Sphinx

by Anne Garréta

  After this nocturnal drifting through deserted streets, I arrived on time at the Apocryphe. A number of people were coming out of impressive cars and rushing to the entrance. The door opened onto violent light and red shadows dancing on a wide staircase illuminated by projector beams, provoking a feeling of disoriented wandering, as if my identity had been lost or dissolved within the chiaroscuro. Passing through the entrance of the club, something of my being was lost or absorbed, an inexplicable and immeasurable stripping away that, once I finally ended up on the dance floor, hadn’t left any of me behind except my carnal covering, spurred on only by the rhythmic pulsing of the music. Confronted with the bass, I was seized by a contraction; on the other extreme, a sharp trepan bore into my skull. The effect dulled once one had grown accustomed to it but continued to operate nevertheless. My body wore itself out with retractions of fleeting deliverance.

  That second night I put into practice and observed the effects of the principles I had managed to deduce the night before. I stopped focusing on mere manual technique and instead focused on the reactions of the dance floor to this or that experimental effect. There I had free rein to try my hand at this new expertise. I was captivated by the idea of a struggle with no stakes other than my own satisfaction. I was experimenting without any restrictions, embarking upon the basics of a new language that no one had taught me; I was the master and the student, but the apprenticeship of this new science was not a form of autodidacticism. Rather, I was discovering the rules as I went along, establishing what had always existed without any basic precepts. Each night I was giving a speech in this unknown, unformulated language, unaware that I was deviating from a specific practice that so many others had followed before me.

  George and the Padre came to see me each in his turn while I was working. In that glassed-in booth, a visit felt like an invasion. We chatted, cramped together, our words masked by the music, obscured behind a wall of sound. They both noticed that I displayed a magnificent and unexpected gift for the task at hand. It was settled that until I found another job I would remain the resident DJ. The Padre couldn’t help acting as a sort of moral guide—he had decided to view this adventure as an ablution, as a necessary submersion in the world of terrestrial passions. It was a type of trial, a confrontation with the excesses of evil designed to steel my character.

  My memory of all this is broken, incomplete. All those nights ended up melting into one, jerky and repetitive like the music I was distilling there in a state of extreme fatigue. I had never stuck with anything long enough to really immerse myself in it. Ennui was my curse and nothing was ever able to shake me out of it. The strangeness lurking beneath the surface of something could only last for so long. Everything quickly became a tainted repetition, void of all charm. Faced with this flesh I was trying to make move every night, I felt disgust, a brutal alternating between excitement and dejection, resulting in surrender to my essential melancholy. All I felt was contempt, such intense contempt! The numerous, innumerable bodies made up a monster of a hundred heads and tangled limbs whose only cohesion and life force came from the rhythmic impulse I dealt to it. The whole night, an absurd imperative commanded me to postpone the inevitable death and division of this collective body that I was making evolve before my eyes, from my glass booth shaking it with charges of sound and bombarding it with lightning. I thought about my work—admittedly mortal and ephemeral—with fear, the fear of a demiurge caught in the position of damned hero, who finds a brother in Sisyphus. The fear of God when He realizes, without having foreseen it, that His first act has now made Him a slave of continuous Creation. God cursing when He realizes that without His knowledge, He has been made the driving engine of the morbid embraces crossing this panicked body born of Him, of His sweat, of His strained efforts and His unarticulated cries. A dizzying disgust would take hold of me as I overcame the inertia of these separate bodies, still reluctant to come together.

  However, I did experience nights of rapture that no human ecstasy can equal, those nights when, for some unknown reason, a sort of inspired fury seized the entire club. This trancelike state that I provoked and prolonged vibrated through my body and carried me to unimaginable excesses of delirium. One such night is still carved into my memory, a Saturday in October—coincidentally also my birthday. The party lasted well beyond the usual timeframe. Strictly speaking, I was no longer listening to the music; it was passing through me. I was cuing up the records as if by instinct, my vision obscured by a veil of blood. I was in a coma agitated by rhythms that were more and more painfully arousing my desire without ever draining it. In a vague fog I discerned the compact mass of people dancing, flattened one against the other and yet swaying, lifted up in waves. United almost without fissure, they were probably incapable of moving, but the entire mass vibrated in rhythm, all individual drives undone and lost in a higher, sovereign need. George told me later that everyone who entered the club mixed gradually into this mob and that between the hours of two and six in the morning nobody left, the employees were overwhelmed. At eight in the morning, emptied, I collapsed onto a bench and went to sleep.

  That night sealed my reputation. It still reigns supreme in my memory; no other night ever achieved such furious intensity. From then on they all seemed bland and nondescript. That night inflicted a violence upon me, an annihilation; I experienced what only sex at its extremes allows one to feel, infrequently and fleetingly. I had reached a limit, and after that came repetition and ennui.

  I was guided by habit, or maybe addiction, as I left my house every night around midnight. I no longer slept at night; what had previously been a tendency of mine became a permanent mode of being. Anxiety would propel me into the streets and at nightfall, as if mechanically, I would get dressed to go out. The pallor of my complexion was heightened; in the light of day I looked like a corpse. Moreover, the sun’s glare hurt my eyes, so I started to avoid it.

  Even when I didn’t have to serve as DJ at the Apocryphe, I would go out to other clubs where I was always let in because people recognized me. I would check out half a dozen, ending up each morning in the club that stayed open the latest, frequented by a mostly black clientele. I dawdled in all the places that were in vogue at the time. My eclecticism pushed me to ignore differences and transgress against exclusions; I entered indiscriminately into clubs that were gay or straight, male or female. I didn’t mind whether the place was a notorious dive or a hideaway of respectable sharks. By nature rather silent and reserved, whether from a sense of privacy or from my convictions, I had little to fear from these drunken late-night wanderings through this beautiful world abandoned to vice. The exquisite correctness of my manners, the benevolent moderation I flaunted in every place and in every circumstance, made it so that I was easily accepted: the Mafiosi propping up the bars would offer me cigars and pat me warmly on the shoulder; the groomed, bejeweled women adored the air of dreamy adolescence still floating around me. The contrast between my young age and the maturity legible in my serious features was comforting; they were sure of my discretion and that sufficed in this milieu. I didn’t drink much, which was astonishing to them. They never once saw me drunk but from the start I made known my high tolerance for alcohol, which they viewed as a strength; once this had been proven, I was able to stop drinking altogether, and they only respected me the more. I pretended that I was victim to gentle vices, the better to conceal my real vices, which would have seemed scandalous. They affectionately mocked me for my intellectual aura. I had to have a fault; they focused on this one and neglected to notice the others. This magnified aura made me feared, which is to say hated, by certain people, but at the same time, the distance that my intellectual reputation established kept me from dangerous familiarities. I spoke little and listened a lot: the ideal role, as so many people are in perpetual search of an indulgent ear for their nighttime rants. The sum of the stories they confided in me could fill entire volumes of sociological or ethnological reports. There was the tedious and nonsensical conver
sation of tipsy society men; the chatter vaguely colored with the philosophy and aestheticism of the washed-up who cling to a completely superficial and secondhand culture as a fiery temper clings to a menopausal bourgeoise; and, in passing, the virile and noxious conversations of old bachelors following the antics of their protégées out of the corner of their eyes—I was subjected to it all, and I listened with all the presence of mind that was still within my power in those hours of confusion.

  What was I looking for there? A distraction from an imperceptible anguish? The response to a question I hadn’t yet formulated? Evasion? Flight? I don’t even know. But it became a game for me to go out like this. Entering a club or a bar was in a way like going to the cinema: a dark room with sounds and images in three dimensions (were there really three?). I lived on the film set of an enormous stock of unrealized B-movies of a hitherto unseen genre. At the hour when the television programs come to an end, when the last spectators leave from the theaters and the marquees are taken down, a different vision appears, a variation each night on the same miserable and violent scenario.

  II

  My new lifestyle wasn’t immediately upended by meeting A***. I merely added a preliminary stop to my nights—an obligatory visit to the Eden. However, my fascination, quickly transforming into passion, soon required more. To satisfy it, I had to start making more than one daily courtesy call.

  A*** loved going out to clubs once the show at the Eden was over. Soon after, some of the other dancers from the Eden, dragged in A***’s wake, would show up at the Apocryphe. They did me the honor of dancing to the music I played and their performance gave me a new enthusiasm for my work. At certain moments throughout the night A*** would come keep me company in my glass booth, dancing until the surroundings were eclipsed, leaning in to say something to me with an accent I found irresistible. A***’s spirit, like A***’s dance, was infused with a crafty and charming naïveté.

  Soon we became rather close; we would call each other almost every day when we woke up and would eat dinner together at least once a week, just the two of us, after which I would allow myself to escort A*** to the Eden. We would meet again at the Apocryphe, and would often go loiter somewhere else after closing. This strange intimacy didn’t stem from any common social or intellectual interests; it wasn’t the sign or effect of a close friendship or romantic relationship. I wasn’t particularly enthralled by the originality of A***’s views, or by a similarity in our tastes; we neither combated nor conversed. Our time together and our conversation were simply a pleasure, like the contemplation of A***’s body or A***’s dance, an aesthetic pleasure that I could attribute only to a lightness of being that never dipped into inanity. I can’t define A*** as being anything other than both frivolous and serious, residing in the subtle dimension of presence without insistence.

  Our arrival together at every locale and the attention we paid to each other started to incite gossip. Our encounters, which took place only in public, aroused suspicions of a private affair that, at the time, didn’t exist. At the Apocryphe and everywhere we went, people made remarks about our striking dissimilarity. They teased me over the contrast in color between our skins, they stressed the difference in our mannerisms: the impulsiveness of A***’s voice and gestures, that wild exuberance and openness to the world, which by comparison underscored my moderation and reserve. A*** in turn had to bear the incessant prattle about my religious and social background. They painted a picture of my incomprehensible oddities: my isolation; my taste for solitude strangely coexisting with a sudden dive into this world; an unheralded abandon of a university career for the improvised post of DJ. For want of any intelligible coherence, they assumed I must have been harboring some kind of vice or perversion.

  What did I get out of spending all my time with someone with whom I shared no social, intellectual, or racial community? That was precisely the question troubling them. Black skin, white skin: our looks were against us. Our intimacy went against the mandate dictating that birds of a feather flock together. And this impossible clash of colors produced the general opinion that this was an unnatural union.

  In order to stop the scandal, we diluted our dissimilarity by always hanging out in a group. But the people in this crowd tried to detach me from A*** by attempting to convince me that we were fundamentally incompatible. I couldn’t care less that my attachment to my seemingly perfect antithesis was provoking worry and alarm. They complained of A***’s numerous affairs, highlighted A***’s notorious fickleness and capriciousness that would make any real attachment impossible. They charitably forewarned me that I wasn’t A***’s “type,” that we weren’t even of the same species. That if my intention was to turn this friendship into something more, it was best to give up now, and that if, by some misfortune, it had already become something more, it was just as well to break it off now before it dissolved into unpleasantries and pain.

  I thoroughly did not care about their opinions, their advice and warnings, their slanders and denigrations. I was well aware of A***’s fickleness, capriciousness, and quickly changing tastes, for I had witnessed all of these traits myself. As for this concert of well-intentioned deceit and charitable denunciations aimed at discouraging me, I was deaf to it all.

  One morning at the Kormoran, that final stopover for night owls, an old mobster whom I knew and liked rather more than his congeners saw me enter with A***, called me over to his usual spot at the bar, and, after the customary ceremonious greetings, imparted this strange speech, interspersed with knowing winks:

  “You know me. I like you. So listen up. All those idiots, they don’t know anything. Because they see us chatting fairly often and because I seem to know you pretty well, for a week now they’ve been coming to me to complain that you’re mucking around, that you’re out of your mind. That you’re foolishly running after that attractive animal there [gesturing toward A***]. You know what they say to me? That it could never work between whites and blacks…And that, furthermore, you two aren’t compatible…That one’s always dancing, you’re always hitting the books. They come to me desperately seeking an explanation…[He paused to finish his whiskey] But they’ve got it all wrong, I’m telling you…I’ve been observing your conquest for two weeks now…And I know what blacks are like…For ten years I’ve been watching them pass through here…Listen to me: if you keep at it, you will succeed...All those assholes are talking bullshit…Saying that you’re lowering yourself! That’s what they’ve been saying to you, right? When you talk to them, they don’t absorb anything, and so they can’t understand what you see in A***…[He ordered another drink and relit his cigar] But I get what you see…Come back to me in a month and we’ll discuss it again. Because it’s not at all a lost cause, it just takes a bit of time. Yeah? Turn on the charm! Bring out the violins and tutti quanti…It takes time, but you can handle it…Have patience, and by God, you will succeed! And they’ll have to eat their words.”

  He firmly grasped my hand after finishing his speech, pronounced in his eternally hoarse voice, rolling the gravel of an accent that rendered him incomprehensible to any ear unaccustomed to the deformations he inflicted on his syllables. The high-end escort keeping him company winked while watching me with a slightly alarmed air. Ruggero, as he called himself, was studying me paternally, a cigar wedged between his teeth, gauging my surprise. “Persevere or you’ll have me to deal with…When you achieve your victory, the champagne is on me. Don’t let yourself be intimidated by the blathering, the scandals, and the bullshit…Now go tend to your love affair.”

  I went and found A***, who had no clue about the sermon I had just endured. No doubt others had taken advantage of those ten minutes I had spent with Ruggero to make remarks about how I seemed to want to capture A***’s attention, and more still, at any price. They saw us everywhere together, but no act or gesture allowed them to definitively conclude it had turned into an affair. They didn’t know what to believe, and for them that was insufferable. They would have excused a brisk adven
ture, without consequence and without tomorrow—what was called in this milieu “getting some ass.” But an attachment that appeared to stem from something other than sex was intolerable.

  Ruggero had, however, clumsily formulated what I had been struggling to express myself, without it being, on my part, a conscious project or concerted maneuver. His soliloquy had clarified and simplified the ideas floating around in my head. Indeed, I’m sure that had been his aim. What I was feeling for A*** needed its own embodiment; the pleasure I took in A***’s company demanded its own fulfillment. I wanted A***, it was true, and all my other desires, needs, and plans paled in comparison. Suddenly, the obsessive clamor for amorous possession took hold of me.

  I was surprised to find myself desiring, painfully. In a sudden rush of vertigo, I was tantalized by the idea of contact with A***’s skin. I wanted to dismiss, destroy all those who were thronging around A***, keeping this presence from me. I wanted to wrest A*** from their company, from the intrusive glances clinging to us there, and hide us both away. With an unknowingly crazed look, I was always watching this irresistible body. But my gaze was narrowing and stiffening under the tension of carnal desire. That night, A*** was wearing a black silk shirt and white pleated leather pants that showed off a firm behind. A***’s hair, shaved not long ago for the show, was beginning to grow back, materializing as a light shadow. That face, thus restored to its pure nudity, appeared without interference, without anything that could deceptively modify its proportions or veil its imperfections. Its features had retained nothing of A***’s African origins, except for a barely perceptible, sensual heaviness of the mouth.