Blue Self-Portrait

by Noémi Lefebvre

  Published by Transit Books

  2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

  www.transitbooks.org

  Originally published in French as L’Autoportrait bleu

  by Éditions Verticales © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2009

  English translation © Sophie Lewis 2017

  First published in English translation by Les Fugitives, London, 2017

  The rights of Noémi Lefebvre and Sophie Lewis to be identified respectively as author and translator of this work have been identified in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN: 978-1-945492-12-9

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2018932617

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Blue Self-Portrait

  Noémi Lefebvre

  Translator’s Note

  Sophie Lewis

  THE CAPTAIN ANNOUNCED SOMETHING NO IDEA WHAT, the steward demonstrated how to breathe with the mask on and how to tie the life jacket but I didn’t look up. I had exactly an hour and thirty minutes in which to switch languages. You’ll have to change that way you talk, my girl, I told myself in German, in French, then in German again, then in French, as if I was my own mother. I took stock of my wounds, from head to toe, from my head hammering with the wrath of grapes, my hunched shoulders, the skitterings in my stomach, my weak knees, both right and left, to my arms and legs grown skinny and me trembling all over almost without stopping; in short I was suffering a fundamental lack of serenity despite sending out serene signals; I was practically basking in fulfillment if you went solely on appearances. If I had allowed my inner goings-on to show you’d have taken me for a cow bellowing at the moon like the time in my car when I started bellowing, moo-calling, I mean, the nocturnal call of the cow, I still wonder how I did it that night, that particular freezing one, I emitted such a horrid bovine cry, there must have been something of the animal in me, a cow on the road, a great cry between two moments of civilization, of Zivilization, I was in simultaneous translation, now crazed down to my bony cylinders I reined in my savage cry, channeled all my energy towards serenity and it was working, so it appeared, no one in this plane would have heard my terrible cry of blöde Kuh as people call each other in Germany, stupid cow, I was translating in simulcast, the domestic yet animal Kuh who looks for her calf at dawn although she knows with her portion of bovine gray cells that the calf with the number-stamped ear will never come back because he is too lastingly not there, goes on calling out for a day or two but ends up buttoning her bellow, goes back to ruminating as if she never had that calf, one calf, nor two or three or any calf with or without a number, the animal who truly sees the dying of each second. I had bellowed so hard that evening that I’d frightened myself, I was so closely aligned with the cow that I was practically in symbiosis with nature, toe-to-toe with nature, as if between she and I the distance had vanished, verschwunden, I translated automatically. And now the desire to bellow seized me again, in mid Berlin-Paris flight. You go to Venice and you end up dying in Venice, you go to a sanatorium and you end up with tuberculosis, one’s environment has a disproportionate impact, I observed yet again, this time inside the plane: no matter what exactly changes around you, wham you are completely messed up, maybe even dead. I hadn’t noticed takeoff, yet I was flying and, as I’m not the keenest breed of traveler, the mere fact of our flight could in itself have sent me into a tailspin, the altitude alone potentially enough to tip me over, though I was unaffected by this flight still my sister was. We’re flying my sister said, can you feel it, we’re flying! Flying has a big impact on me, every time feels as big as my first flight, I could see the effect on her but nothing for me, I said I could feel it but I couldn’t; so we wouldn’t get started I opened a book and got stuck in. I did my best to lose myself in my book, to become as one with the book, to think of nothing outside it, to feel nothing except what was sensed by my eyes on the paper but of course I could see myself clearly trying to forget myself and trying to become as one and dissolve myself so really I wasn’t absorbed in anything, was becoming nothing and could feel nothing at all. That was a super trip my sister said, said over and over, and I replied yes, super, exceptional, I’ll never forget it, she said again and I replied me neither, never. I was actually thinking never, truly never, how could I forget, and my insides were exploding noiselessly while meltwater flowed from my forehead and down my back.

  Coming out of the Kaiser Café in the Sony Center, after dizzying the pianist with a flood of verbiage, I’d literally floored him by talking, I took advantage of him being German-American to clap him on the back matily as I’ve seen Germans do and also in old American films, though it’s rarely done by women, I don’t recall a woman ever doing it in an old American film, I was devastated that I’d talked so much, I talked your ear off, so so sorry, I said while clapping him on the back like a man which I’m not, like an old friend which I’m not, like an old girlfriend which I wasn’t at the time when he said no, not at all, it’s quite all right in his German-American accent—I must have said my bit in German and he replied in French. Ich habe zu viel gesprochen and I clap him on the back, no, not at all, it’s quite all right, and he touches my arm in the German or American way to communicate friendly affection, I went on, in French now, that it was he who had taught me so, so many things, and I who it seemed was now teaching him something. I had less than nothing to teach him but it was too late, I had talked so much in my passionate, learned and over-expansive way that he must have given up somewhere along the line, actually when I began, from the first word I spoke, from the first parting of my lips and as if to compensate for my missing tooth I had already talked too much, in that passionate, learned and oh so shameless way, you cut modesty class the pianist might have said, so your mother didn’t teach you much about modesty but he didn’t say it, would have had he been me but the pianist and I are two separate people, he modest and I immodest, it was all coming back to me now in the plane between one cloud and the next, between nought and nought, difference condensed, the shamelessness came back to me all of a sudden, I saw myself as I am, so immodest, a fact screaming out to be recognized though it wasn’t, nevertheless, doing that much screaming, neither that fact nor anything else. The passengers were reading and drinking coffees, a plane is no place for screaming, cars yes but not a plane, cars are perfect for your ordinary, personal scream, a scream of truth without obvious motive but the plane solely for unpremeditated and collective screaming with clear and present motive. Why, I wondered belatedly, couldn’t I simply have sat and read my book at the Kaiser Café? and why couldn’t I have had that coffee at Café Einstein two days earlier, drunk a nice coffee while leafing through the newspaper as has been done at the Einstein for centuries in the same relaxed and cultured manner, with the peaceful murmur of a little Mozart piano concerto that never did anyone a bad turn, why couldn’t I have done that, been sitting on that chair in the Einstein without knotting up my legs as if they were venomous snakes and hunching my shoulders as if the weight of the world were upon them when here, at the Einstein, no one ever feels the world’s weight on any part of them, even at the worst point in world history, unswervingly dedicated to its café reputation, and I knew it as soon as I walked in, fifteen years since I’d last been here but everything was the
same so I knew it, you can’t put that down to ignorance. This is the place where the whole world is reading the papers, I had told my sister you’ll see, and I said it again because I found it witty, Café Einstein is a refuge from the world which contains the whole world in its newspapers. It’s true that it’s relaxing, a retirement home for those of fragile constitution such as girls like me; it’s arresting here and arrest is a break from the world, I was explaining to my sister, my best audience, security is relaxing when you’re cultured as the people in here are. Nuclear war could break out but it wouldn’t make a difference to the mood in Café Einstein, I thought then as I’d already thought before, but I don’t know if it was with relief or irony or indifference this time or before, we would read in the papers about the catastrophic effects of a nuclear war on the people of Berlin, completely wiped out, every single neighborhood annihilated, the utter destruction of Charlottenburg, the total elimination of the Europa Center and the demolishment into terminal smithereens of the Gedächtniskirche, the memorial church, I translated to myself, memorial of what, memorial not of rout but of nought, the obliteration of all the beautiful grand houses on Kurfürstenstrasse and of all its residents in a great sweep of destruction would make front page news right up to the Einstein’s front door—and all this listening peacefully to that sweet little Mozart piano concerto. Some guy could perfectly well walk in wearing a suicide belt and blow the buffet to kingdom come right there in the main salon shouting Allahu Akhbar and we’d be reading about it in the papers while smoking the odd cigarette and listening with half an ear to the light, inoffensive concerto as Mozart in the background always has been, for as long as background music has been around. Why couldn’t I content myself with flicking through die Welt, a man of culture as all the men here are, a discreet and peace-loving man of culture who twiddles the silver spoon in his coffee without knotting up his limbs like snakes and smokes moderately, in no way like a trooper; why did I have to terrorize the pianist from the word go with my ideas about everything? You have ideas about everything, the pianist could have said but he didn’t say it; sometimes it’s good to keep schtum, he could have said, so interrupting, with this common-sense remark, the unquenchable stream of observations and ingenious associations that flowed from me, each new idea more striking, subtle, singular and wondrous than the last, the pianist thus arresting this verbal invasion, as voluminous as it was shapeless, barbarity versus culture at the Café Einstein, where ideas flow noiselessly and only achieve their impact in the silence of the written and their profundity in the meditation of print. I’d have done better to read die Welt like any other habitué and better to enjoy the concerto floating around me while leafing through the paper in that relaxed, cultured way typical of the place, I could’ve it wouldn’t have been hard, if I’d only followed the natural inclination of culture as ushered on by the establishment, retreat and arrest-cure, I wouldn’t right now be exploding on the inside in European airspace, between nought and nought, indifference on all sides. Instead of making the most of that hallowed arena reputed the most conducive to culture, I was considering it now in the plane, therefore much too late, in shame, deep shame, I re-coiled my legs like venomous snakes and hunched my shoulders, what’s more I’d blitzed the pianist with a blizzard of shameless data in the purest tradition of girls without any self-control, inflicting on him the worst tortures of the Inquisition with my ill-educated habit of breaking the rules of conversation, which I’d never learned but I could at least have aped, the ape copies man better than I do I was thinking, catching sight of my misplaced girl’s head in the Café Einstein mirror; nothing of the ape to be seen there, apery as limitation and imitation as a guarantee of decorum, the decorous ape missing from the mirror where the extra-to-requirements indecorous girl sees herself as she truly is, what are you doing here, far from the ape, what is it you’re really after, leaping from branch to branch in front of the mirror like an ape-imitator, the inhumanity of the animal aping not man but ape, in instinctive imitation I leapt at any old straw. But what is it you’re really after? the pianist finally asked, blushing at my volleys of apery, my sister aping her ape for one act and I aping my sister for act two, we, my sister and I the Ape Inquisition and the pianist begging for mercy, how I ever came to this, interrogating an innocent pianist in the hot-seat of a popular intellectual café I don’t know, what I do know is that nothing will ever make it not have happened. I had to interrogate him, I had to trample barbarously upon the oh-so-French rules of conversation that I ought to have learned from Madame de Staël who I always refused to read, the quality of Madame de Staël’s conversation in the Prussian salons a model of restraint and French good taste but I just had to interrogate him in the most obnoxious way, I tried out my inquisition on the pianist who had come here specially to see me, the venue his choice, here precisely in all Berlin, to see me, he had chosen this perfect spot to promote from the start a peaceful, reassuring and cultured climate between us, tailor-made for our conversation and its disposition, instead of which he found himself hauled in for interrogation by an entirely shameless girl descended from apes, accompanied by a sister clearly fruit of the same tree and with hardly more moral compass than the first girl as far as he could tell.

  One more piece of luck: I didn’t explain to the pianist how to play the piano, it was touch and go, I told myself later in the plane, it was a close-run thing, I could very well have done it, I’m perfectly capable, I know I’m capable of explaining the art of the well-tempered keyboard to a pianist as if I myself were a virtuoso. I don’t know anything about music, I’m sitting in front of a virtuoso pianist and explaining exactly how your fingers should rest on the keys, see what I’m capable of. I’m explaining to him how to do it, as if the virtuoso pianist were just waiting for me all along to show him the best way to go about it at last, as if he was going to be filled with wonder at all the little pianistic techniques that I would generously furnish him with so he could improve his playing and become even more virtuosic thanks to me. I truly am capable of leading a masterclass for a great pianist of worldwide renown. Of explaining (I can just see myself) how one ought to tackle the second movement of Beethoven’s Concerto in C major, for example, the opening attack, the crisp yet simultaneously resonant C chord and, in sweeping overview, on the generosity—I could hear myself in full flow—discoursing upon the generosity in Beethoven as if this were possible, and then upon the detail, a marginally lighter touch here, a little more color there; I would quite have expected the pianist ultimately to modify his interpretation of the second movement and to follow these little tips freely given by me, who cannot play the piano and know nothing about Beethoven. A piece of luck I narrowly squeaked out of that.

  Two days later, leaving the Kaiser Café where I had once again all but spelled out to the virtuoso pianist how to handle his piano, a stroke of luck that I’d stopped myself just in time, I uttered my notorious Ich habe zu viel gesprochen for it was true, I had said too much, so much too much that I had to proclaim this brand-new truth the very moment it occurred to me; my noble pianist: no, not at all, it’s quite all right, he sweetly replied, warmly replied, even though it wasn’t fine, not only not fine but catastrophic, so catastrophic as to be irreparable, besides I didn’t repair anything but on the contrary promptly went and dug myself in deeper: of course I had to interrupt again, when I had only just said Ich habe zu viel gesprochen, I didn’t pause and count to ten, not to ten nor to any lesser number, I didn’t count at all; I just had to go on and on in the underground car park when he, our poor pianist, was already and indeed for some time had been, broken, kaput, as they say, in fact just five minutes after stepping inside the Kaiser Café he’d already begun to yawn, ten minutes in was out of commission and quite kaput, and yet here we are in the underground car park and I’m picking on his car, I have to make some comment about his car being unworthy of a world-class pianist, as if all that I’d said before in the Kaiser Café hadn’t been appalling, about music in general and t
he pianist’s playing in particular even though I haven’t the first notion about music in general, and as for the pianist’s playing in particular here I go even now critiquing it from every angle, not only the music performed by the pianist but also that composed by the composer, the pianist being both pianist and composer, I am a pianist first and foremost and yet foremost and first of all I am a composer, the pianist said one day to all within earshot, indeed the pianist did have a talent for composing that not every pianist is blessed with—and the composer a pianistic virtuosity to which few composers may lay claim, both gifts united in a single person, in the perfect bodily and spiritual harmony that alone could justify the general and nevertheless exceptional title of musician; I am, above all a musician, the pianist said, it isn’t my profession but my condition, yet in spite of his condition I held back a mere hair’s breadth away from explaining to the pianist how to play the piano and to the composer how to compose. In the car park right now, I’m inspecting his vehicle, inside and out, the state of the bodywork, the ergonometry of the seats, I’ve estimated its resale value and underestimated all other values, sat in there ready to ride shotgun though minus the gun, broadcasting my observations about his car, unworthy as it was of a world-class pianist, it’s no good, however clearly I see it coming I always end up slagging off anyone and everyone precisely when tête à tête with a very particular someone, I brazenly sabotage all chance of a future as if I didn’t know that what’s said is said, retraction is out of the question, it is definitively too late.

  It’s the same every time. Every time I vow I won’t let it happen again and every time it happens. If I was the pianist, I’m sure I would have got on my nerves, a girl who has just apologized for talking too much and then motormouths slap into another clanger: my car, to boot. You can’t know what kind of bond unites a driver and his car, impossible at first sighting to grasp the often complex and very personal rapport between driver and car; the nature of the car says something about its driver and the driver likewise about the car, any car salesman will recognize the highly sensitive nature of this complex relationship but I in my bulletproof girlhood, unsullied by all mechanical considerations and without regard for the mechanic’s expertise, boldly I attack, no quarter given, the subject of his car upon which it turns out that the pianist attaches immense importance to the old banger and loves it truly and feels that he and it are only whole when they’re together. He drives his car on ex-GDR roads, on these roads of the former republic that are still complete chaos, he crosses the still deeply sorrowful countryside, this once-upon-a-time republic still effectively lying fallow and as good as medieval, a pure pleasure, superreal elation, oh the deep, deep joy of the driver driving free, independent, wealthy with all the possibilities, why should he give a damn about notions of relativity and me telling him without the least respect for his perhaps terribly personal and intimate relationship with his dreadful old banger that God alone knows one can’t go round in such an old rust-bucket when one is a pianist and a world-class one at that. He’s obliged to accept it, the appellation world-class pianist, simply forced to swallow the irony in that title and to face the fact that for me, Miss Bulletproof herself, knowing nothing of the dynamics of pleasure, a car like his must be the object of jocularity, even ridicule, while for him nothing of the sort, reigning Miss Immortal, I trample anti-commercial values without restraint and deny the possibility of any attachment so deep, so powerful, so authentic, to this car and no other, as to be practically in the pianist’s DNA, when the same pianist was just the other week driving this very banger (though world-class in his eyes) through the fields and copses of that erstwhile republic, heading for Neuhardenberg Castle, in other words, he was touring about the open country, joyously driving in the sub-sublime and frozen landscape of the Brandenburg backwoods, at the far edge of reunited Germany and a mere ten unlucky kilometers from Poland, a Brandenburg castle then a Prussian one then Nazi then Communist and then returned to its heirs and state-subsidized into a space of high unified German culture, the superbly restored castle of Neuhardenberg as described in the leaflet, the hallowed place to which the pianist was driving at the wheel of that altogether world-class car the company of which alone could make him whole, to see the exhibition “Music and the Third Reich.”