Blue Self-Portrait

by Noémi Lefebvre

  Weltanschauung is not one of the pianist’s words, it’s absent from the pianist’s vocabulary, I’d recognized and understood the pianist’s hostile stance to all Weltanschauung from the start and even before he conceived it, when the pianist came across the Blue Self-Portrait he really fell hard for the intentional absence of Weltanschauung in Schoenberg’s canvas, in which rather than both his ears the painter depicted just the one. For Schoenberg one ear is enough the pianist had observed and understood, the intensity of a single ear is the extent of what’s useful for Schoenberg, the pianist struck by the absence of the other ear and wondering, understanding, the whispers of contemporaries was enough for Schoenberg, two ears for a whisper is obviously far too many, a single one pressed to a wall enables better audition of contemporaries than two, one ear is enough to listen and two to confuse the whisper with noise and the noise with clamor and the clamor with the terror of undergoing collective Weltanschauung, the single missing ear, the ear missing an ear cut off and all the missing and cut-off ears, humanity no different from the cornered bull, ears mutilated so as to hear only the crucial whispers and not the clamor, mutilated and tossed in a heap like a pile of shoes is tossed, we could have avoided the heap of shoes by making the choice, as Schoenberg did, of a single ear, the other blood and phosphor organ wrapped in the linen, solo blue ear the one listening to his contemporaries, the pianist thought as he left the Sony Center car park, could only with the girl and never another have talked about that single ear and whispered in the girl’s a music for contemporaries, the contemporaries who, the pianist had said in the Museum of Resistance and Deportation, are the sons and daughters of the shoe-thieves, the shoes of children and the elderly alike, the contemporaries the sons and daughters of those who didn’t stop them, said the pianist, to the audience and not to the girl, she from the top of the steps had understood perfectly as she would have understood perfectly in the Neuhardenberg Castle restaurant, and heard which is to say understood too in the car the opening whisper of the composer’s Blue Self-Portrait, a polyphony of disjointed timbres, he’d have whispered in the girl’s ear now lying beneath the black trees, the girl shivering again but with desire, don’t speak be quiet please don’t say anything shut up the pianist began again where he’d left off, listen please, in the natural last-of-winter silence not yet the joyful spring of migrating birds, our contemporaries’ whispers, this piece is the only music worthy of you, this piece is for you, listen it says nothing about the world as a whole but whispers a limited knowledge of the world, for you a limited and partial knowledge keep listening, would have slowed the heartbeat his and the girl’s and lost himself in the girl, could have lost himself in that listening, would have lost control of the music in the girl’s ear and stripped the girl bare beneath the black trees emptied of migrating birds, and dressed the girl in his brand-new composition, he wouldn’t merely have heard but heard with sympathy, would have lost himself beneath the black trees and close to the end, his body now lumpen and numb as before decomposition, stiff except for his hands, still he tries to be close to a body, not the girl’s but the body reading by the bedside light, the familiar almost family body of a usual accompaniment, tries to recover the serenity of what’s his in body and mind, would like to return to the calm warmth of the usual accompaniment’s Mutterbrust but senses in alarm a tepidity that chills him. “That I have written nothing I should be ashamed of forms the foundation of my moral existence” hears the supine pianist and sees again the Blue Self-Portrait on the wall, Schoenberg with his one blue ear frightens him when the usual accompaniment reads propped on her elbow, soundless but for slow and peaceful and terribly warm breathing, the odorous, heavy, anti-musical breathing that crashes over the pianist’s ear like a barbarous buzzing while beneath the black trees, his ear upon the girl’s ribcage, he was memorizing for ever the ever varied and imaginative and genuinely original breathing of the girl, exact echo of the whisper, that I’ve written nothing, moral existence, written nothing, existence, morale, written, moral, existence or nothing, was not falling asleep.

  Sleep a bit, if only, close eyes to sleep and not to think or pray or feel but yes sleep, oh to sleep at last! here now without thinking much about it yet without struggle or striving, I closed my eyes but no more than a few seconds, sleeping in planes is impossible beside my sister whose delight in flying does not let up before landing. There’s Paris can you see, my sister said, we’re insanely lucky to see Paris from this particular spot in the sky, I once flew over Paris in a helicopter it was unforgettable but from here look and it’s Paris with the river, different from the plane than from the helicopter, Revoir Paris my sister sang Un p’tit séjour d’un mois, Charles Trenet always and over again since the day of Papa’s funeral, the day of my sister’s resurrection and Papa’s both at once, my sister’s resurrection ought to have restored Papa and not the other way round, seeing her resplendent above Paris I realize once again, seeing my sister’s splendor is generally enough to bring anyone to life but our father in particular certainly, as for the other way round we’ll have no idea right up to the Last Judgment and even then not sure. Papa would have loved to see this, my sister said reading my thoughts before I’d thought them, that’s so her, to say simply Papa would have loved this, yes I said, this more than anything, flying in the plane and seeing the river and Paris all around the river from here like us and also seeing my sister and I so nice each of us and each to the other, I could kill myself thinking how much he’d’ve loved it, Papa, seeing this, the incredible panorama us in the plane and Paris down below, nothing to anyone else but everything to him, his pride seeing us in the European sky no hatred for anyone and so nice, the great war he never experienced rubbed clean away and the other one that messed up his childhood, both wound up and us two flying there, my sister afraid of nothing and without a word to say against anyone and I seeing Paris forgetting as the cow forgets her calf, forgetting the language. Thomas Mann and Theodor W Adorno slipped from my still-weak knees and fell closed over each other beneath the seat in front, I picked them both up and stowed them together in my bag. The plane descending the language moves on, German fades out, I can already feel it fading out, I said to my sister, it does this every time, an hour and a half for German to fade right away, I’ve nothing more to say I who talks too much, have no language left only the music and in the music alone the escape routes, that’s a good sign, I said to my sister, forgetting the language is a beginning. My sister knew before I said it, she’s just like me, precisely the same although not, I’ll fit the pieces back together, there, I’ll take some time at home quietly fitting my pieces back and I’ll eat well and sleep well, I’ll take outdoor walks, that’s what I’ll do, I said to my sister, I too shall be radiant. You will be radiant my sister said my sister, from the moment we reach the airport you’ll start to feel different and as though you’re glowing, the plane isn’t as good for you as for me I can see that, flying only makes you melancholy but you’ll see once we’re back on land. Look, land! Land!

  The captain talked the standard talk about outside temperature and the few minutes that remained of the descent, eighteen degrees the captain said with pride, it’s definitely warming up, the pianist began to get dressed. From his veranda he had watched summertime take over the Tiergarten, how the decision to change season was ratified by the trees, the sky and the city suits, light clothing, Parisian elegance, to go for a stroll, yes walk now, go for this stroll in the midst of the new climate which has plucked him from his faithful night, streaking the sheet with this ray of random particles which seemed to fall directly from the wings of an angel. He’d go as far as the angel, would cross lawns with the first of the wild rabbits and begin to make out his ending, walking like this on the soft grass would conceive a reprise, a return to the allegro in sonata form without a true second subject, after the inversion have the torrents of birds come in around the G, to swoop down as far as D-flat and there, suspended, silence, nine beats, plucked strings, diminished fifth
followed by the cluster describing a chromatic circle from where he will draw, through slow, low-pitched contiguity, the pure negativity of the blue. He would stop in the midst of the rabbits because, despite the planes passing overhead and the blackbirds’ clowning, he’d hear yesterday’s anxiety thickened with weakness and regret which would, in this new dawn of time, make him feel right to the tips of his still fingers that chill sensation, the chill that never left the girl, that girl no other, then, as if it was funny, he would stare at the green trees and, shading his eyes with his hand, would salute the just-flown figure of the Blue Self-Portrait.

  Translator’s Note

  INSOUCIANT: are we ever, enough, too much?

  Funny that one of the keys to this novel should be not caring. Our heroine is castigated repeatedly, and repeatedly berates herself, for the crime of “désinvolture.” What is this elegant French notion? Why, nonchalance, insouciance, of course. Plain old frivolity, laidbackness, devilmaycareism, happy-go-lucky style; in the plainest of English, it’s not caring. But she does care—hence all the obsessing—and, as my narrator’s translator, so must I. Funny then how impossible it was to find the right single word to translate this term so often reiterated it counts more as a musical leitmotif than a point of prose argument. I considered all the words above at one time or another. Also flippancy, apathy, heedlessness and casualness. I swung between the light and breezy, désinvolture as a delighted freedom from the burdens of the world, and désinvolture as culpably turned-off, disaffected, absent. None of these was precisely wrong. Their problem was irremediable specificity, where Lefebvre’s magisterial word said them all and more in one go. After discussion and disagreement that lasted some months, my editor and I came to near-agreement on the one term that said nearly as much as the original French: “not-caring” (occasionally, a more standard “not caring” too, depending).

  In addition to saying as much as we could make it say, the plainness of “not-caring” and its verging on neologism seemed appropriate, for Lefebvre’s language is often about language, and also languages. Blue Self-Portrait plays out in a French sown through with German and English, American English mostly. The narrator herself is frequently on auto-translate, trying herself out in different languages, over and over, back and forth. Our plain-Englishism belies the history of French, English and more behind it.

  Important too, for this term and many others in the book—accompaniment, counter-phrase, nice and niceness, shame and shamelessness, legs knotted and unknotted, overviews of waterways, criticisms of cars, cows’ lowing, flute-playing, so many more—is the very twentieth-century musicality of their use, the repeated striking of these notes in ways that recall the leitmotif we imagine as we listen to twelve-tone music. Remember (Lefebvre doesn’t let us forget; in her book forgetting is another highly culpable error) that our Blue Self-Portrait is first of all a genuine painting by the seminal twentieth-century composer Arnold Schoenberg, who invented the twelve-tone serial system and thereby enabled classical music to become a truly modern and modernist art form. As Lefebvre probes how we can remember some of the most shameful ideas of the last century, she weaves her text in approximation of a serialist piece. Not only had I as translator to find the right note or word to strike, I had also to strike it as nearly as possible every time Lefebvre did. I was expecting this translation to be a tough job and so it proved.

  Nonetheless, I hope your experience as reader is at least as much of a giggle as it is a serious interrogation of your attitude to history or a test of your musical antennae. No, I hope it’s more a giggle than anything else, for Lefebvre’s dominant key is absurdity. Translating this girl who imagines herself as a cow mooing loudly enough to break the glass in her plane’s portholes, a girl who despite hang-ups gives as good as she gets to her one-time mother-in-law over a tennis match, who delights in her parachutist’s boyfriend’s irreverence and can’t rein in her neuroses even on dates with her buttoned-up “world-class” pianist love interest, has been a hoot, if an unexpectedly educational one.

  Sophie Lewis

  January 2017

  NOÉMI LEFEBVRE was born in 1964 in Caen, and now lives in Lyon, France. She is the author of three novels, all of which have garnered intense critical success: her debut novel L’Autoportrait bleu (2009), L’état des sentiment à l’âge adulte (2012), and L’enfance politique (2015).

  SOPHIE LEWIS is a literary editor and translator from French and Portuguese into English. She has translated Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, and João Gilberto Noll, among others.

  Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities. Visit us online to learn more about our forthcoming titles, events, and opportunities to support our mission.

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