by Fleur Jaeggy
Marcel met a strange melancholy boy at school, Georges Guieysse. The two quickly became inseparable and began working together. Every page Marcel wrote passed through Georges’s hands. They were like Renaissance Humanists: Marcel composed letters to him in Greek and signed off in Arabic — or sometimes just with a simple “shake hands.” Marcel confided in Georges: he was often incredibly tired, his ideas escaped, his memory got fragmented. Why not go to Australia or Canada and become kitchen boys. And then Georges wasn’t around for a period. When they did see each other, Georges would crouch in the corner, clasping at his spleen, while his scholarly friend went on, building itineraries for the voyages they would one day take. On the seventh of May 1889, Georges Guieysse shot himself through the heart. He was twenty years old.
From that point on, Marcel took up residence in the severe, often deserted halls and archives of the Bibliothèque Mazarine where he unearthed papers about François Villon and the band of Coquillards. He turned into a writer. One evening in autumn, when the rain was already cold, he met a young working girl with a childish spirit and fell in love. Louise is skinny, consumed by tuberculosis, just a wretch with brown hair, her almond eyes dazed and scornful. She writes him notes in colored pencil. Marcel is enchanted by the foolish little things Louise tells him. An example: “Pookie, my hair is falling out, don’t forget how your nails grow and the scales from your skin fall. My tummy hurts. I sewed up my doll’s nose and now it’s much shorter and fatter. But I forgot to leave her nostrils. I’ll have to go back in with the scissors later but for now I seem to have lost them. Don’t forget to bring me a new pair when you come. At least then you’ll be helpful. Pookiewooky.”
A passion for play overtook the wise man. His pockets were always full of cotton string, needles, and fabric squares with colored borders. He smiled a lot and spoke in a falsetto voice with the publisher of the newspaper, a man he hated. In the meantime, Marcel was apprehensively watching over Baby Vise’s condition. The doctors were aghast by the unhygienic conditions in which she lived: such a tiny room, not a whiff of air, the window was only a few centimeters wide and always kept closed. Louise smoked one cigarette after another, or cigars, or Marcel’s pipe, and she drank coffee. Louise died before long. After the funeral the unhappy writer returned to the room; he arranged all of the babies in a trunk and brought them home. His friends stayed with him at all times, because whenever he was left alone, Marcel got frightened that the dead girl would die again. He sees her ghost laughing in the corners of the room; its watery eyes seem to suggest new games. Marcel packs the scissors and pocketknives into a box, and he throws away the needles and the scraps. He grows superstitious and always wants to sleep. Even in his sleep he can hear echoes of her coarse laughter, but he can no longer hear the chirping and nonsense in her — the child aged in death. When he looks at himself in the mirror the next morning he has grown old — his hair has fallen out overnight, and now his forehead is even larger.
He started using morphine. It provided moments of great solitude. When his friends leave, he bolts his doors and windows after them so that not a sound filters through — perennial hours stratify like eternity across the room. This is when he became the true Great Sheik of Knowledge and Grimoires, which was the honorific Doctor Jean-Claude Mardrus bestowed on him in his dedication to volume XV of his translation of Le livre des mille nuits et une nuit. Mardrus had a honeyed voice and his laughter on occasion irritated Schwob. He wore long capes with embroidered edges and pendant buttons, the inside pockets heavy with gold coins. The extraordinary legends Mardrus told were interpolated with stories of money. Before too long, Schwob preferred to do away with that friendship too. He conceived of writing the Vies imaginaires. Those men who live like dogs, those sainted women credulous in the face of any clever monk, those who damn themselves, indulging a longing for everything beneath them — this was the company that Schwob kept now. He realizes that he’s smiling when he reads his own words aloud to himself. “Don’t embrace the dead because they suffocate the living . . . Don’t go into cemeteries. The dead are pestilent.” Schwob was already sick and he knew he’d never recover.
He married the actress Marguerite Moreno in 1900 in London. That same year, in a pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Marcel met a young Chinese man named Ting, and hired him as a manservant. He decided to follow in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, “55 percent artist and 45 percent adventurer,” with whom he’d cultivated a long correspondence. Schwob and Ting set off for the South Seas on board the Ville de La Ciotat. Upon learning of the departure, Schwob’s friend Jules Renard quipped, “He lives his stories before dying.” On the boat there were corrupt functionaries, colonial magistrates who never stopped talking, a civilian family with four bullish daughters with thick red braids, and an albino boy who looked like a fat farm girl wearing men’s clothes. Right away, the voyage seemed too long. In Colombo he drowsily contemplated the babel of religion. There were cartloads of people praying in a cavern, a Tamil feast. He was always tired and it was hard to breathe; the hot wind blew at him and dust and flies stuck to his skin. The Australian landscape seemed sinister, long cadaverous beaches where the brush moved in the wind like the gnarled hair of dead people. In Samoa they called him Tulapla, the talk man, and kept him up late into the night telling stories. He shook the hand of King Mataafa, who looked like Bismarck. Schwob did not get to Stevenson’s tomb under the flowers on top of Mount Vaea. He didn’t find what he was looking for. A certain Captain Crawshaw showed him some notes in Stevenson’s hand — one of them recommended mystery and discretion and also begged Crawshaw to locate Captain Wurmbrand in Tonga and bring him back. Wurmbrand was an Austrian adventurer of whom Stevenson was very fond. It was a nuanced wandering through memories, leading toward the enchanted shadows. A crumpled catalog remains from his long journey. He met tearful imposters who dragged themselves before him with business propositions, ruined con men, the ragtag mobs of brigands and criminals that he knew so well. In the midst of that busy soup he yearned for his room in Paris.
Upon returning there, he shut himself into his house so that he could breathe. The titles of books he would never write: Océanide, Vaililoa, Captain Crabbe. He would never again want to leave. He felt like a “dog cut open alive.” Won’t the dead come to talk for just half an hour with this sick man? His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could close his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.
© 2015 Adelphi Edizioni S.P.A., Milan
Translation © 2017 by Minna Zallman Proctor
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Published by arrangement with Adelphi Edizioni, Milan.
New Directions gratefully acknowledges the support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original in 2017
Manufactured in the United States of America
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jaeggy, Fleur, author. | Proctor, Minna, translator.
Title: These possible lives / Fleur Jaeggy ; translated by Minna Zallman Proctor.
Other titles: Vite congetturali. English
Description: First American paperback edition. | New York : New Directions, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017000507 | ISBN 9780811226875 (acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: De Quincey, Thomas, 1785–1859. | Keats, John, 1795–1821. |
Schwob, Marcel, 1867–1905.
Classification: LCC PQ4870.A4 V5813 2017 | DDC 854/.914 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.
gov/2017000507
eISBN: 9780811226882
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