by Nizon, Paul.
In his last years, Sandro developed a sort of strategy for success. He had started painting portraits, and it looked as if he could build up a clientele with that, mainly in Germany. He had bought himself a car and now drove on many occasions to the Stuttgart area, where prosperous clients would spend a fair bit of money on a Sandro Thieme portrait. And then he had an accident on one of these trips through France in winter. He lost control of his car on an icy curve and it crashed into a tree. The horn got stuck and sounded for a long time through the winter night, terrible, and Sandro lay, with no outward sign of an injury, dead in the snow.
Why had he come to Paris? He had certainly dreamed of making his fortune here as a painter. He held Picasso in high esteem and may have come here following in his footsteps. But Picasso was no longer in Paris, he was on Olympus; and the Paris that received Sandro was the citadel of Wols, Fautrier, Soulages, Dubuffet, Mathieu, the followers of Yves Klein; there was no movement there that could have included him, influenced him, recharged him. He had a few pals, no friends; he knew an art dealer, a gallery owner on Rue de Seine, from whom he could borrow some money if necessary. What was the city to him? He had an undying love for it, even if he didn’t talk about it; he loved the asylum that it offered him, as it offered everyone, along with the absolute, occasionally alarming freedom.
He must also have loved that the city was also a sort of Tower of Babel. Yes, he had probably dedicated himself to the Tower, invisible but omnipresent; he was secretly one of the people building up this Tower whose foundations lay in the darkest obscurity of the past and whose crown faded in the indiscernibility of the future, he sat on one of the countless cornices and carved hideous faces in the stone, heard the whispering and the sounds of work, the voices from distant centuries mixed with the murmuring of prophecies and talk of what was to come; there was a humming as if from a colony of bees, as if from flocks of birds that one can’t see, the rushing of rivers, the sound of dust settling, of rubble falling; and the noise of factories; mating calls and the mask of madness; horses neighing and wraiths riding, ghosts wafting past.
No, I couldn’t say what kept Sandro in Paris, I didn’t know; I also didn’t know why I was in Paris, accept me, create me, my behavior was that of a man unhappy in love trying to talk a woman into yielding to him. I was a suitor, was repeatedly rejected, and would probably die of my presumptuous love. If I was outside, on the streets, in the pushing and shoving, the flow of this bustling life, then I could feel warm and well, I was right in the midst of it, “in the city,” united with it, myself an element of it, admittedly drowning in everything it had to offer, but nevertheless a part of it, sharing in it.
But if I was back in the apartment again, at my place, then I’d fallen out of it, because this being touched on all sides, because this being picked up and being part of it couldn’t be simulated. Only in the fleeting union did I belong to it and feel saved by a sort of love, saved from my fate, from isolation. Saved from the agony of being without insight.
I found myself in this boxroom of a tiny apartment located on Rue Simart in the 18th arrondissement, but where was that? Where in the city, where in the world? I knew it less and less. Me in Paris? Me in Paris, France, Europe, the world, the universe?
Here I was the disappearing one, the louse, the atom, and this Here could wipe me out wherever I went; it could cast me out into the darkness, where I’d be lost, where I was helpless, a darkness that couldn’t be brightened by any knowledge of the place, by any “insight.” When I rode around in the evening on a well-lit bus, in this close contact with the many people now returning home from their workplaces; in the midst of these people tired after a day’s work, in these smells of clothing and bodies, between people reading the newspaper, women weighed down by shopping bags full to overflowing, and among them perhaps a pretty one, a saucy one; once there was a tremendously attractive dark-skinned woman in a skirt that was tight around her knees and a jacket that emphasized her shoulders, and her hair, combed back on one side, let me see one of her temples, and her eyes, like dark gemstones afloat in their alabaster-white settings, looked shyly away from the slightest contact with a stranger’s gaze and didn’t look back, and on her extremely finely formed ears, heavy pendants hung from silver attachments, pulling her earlobes down and jingling gently at the slightest turn of her head; she sat lost in thought, as if behind glass, in the packed bus, and when she stood up and disappeared, a fat woman sat down with a thud on the seat that had become free, a gray person, continually grabbing at her shopping bag that kept slipping down over her short legs; and through the noise of the motor inside the bus, through the soporific sounds of the vehicle in motion, that created their own type of silence, I heard the insistent talk of what I assumed were a few black men, it was a carefree, good-natured palaver (or at least that’s what it sounded like), in that unmistakable, guttural register, which could suddenly crack and switch over into a high, birdlike screeching, as if he’d suddenly lost his voice; on the bench across from me were Arabs, their faces prickly with stubble, their expressions gloomy, forever grim; when I rode along the familiar route across the city, dozing in the bus, and now and then pressing my face to the window to make out a street name, the name of a bus stop, Vauvenargues, Pont Cardinet, names that glided past, and I kept an eye out for a reference point with which I could associate the name, there, la Clé au juste Prix, in lettering as long as a giraffe’s neck, on a tiny steel door painted ice-blue, I had wanted to take a closer look at it for a long time, I thought, but nonetheless had never gotten off the bus because I was too lethargic, but now that I had the image of this part of the street before my eyes, and how the street looked in the morning, I remembered that at exactly this place on this insignificant street something had excited or enthralled me, there was something in the air there for me, I thought, you’ll have to take a closer look at this part of town, but by then we had already crossed Avenue de Saint-Ouen, then Avenue de Clichy, and now, before my inner eye, I could already see Place de Clichy with its Café Wepler, which Miller wrote about, I knew this part of town very well, it was about a forty-five minute walk from my apartment, formerly I had often taken a stroll to Clichy, down Rue Caulaincourt and past Montmartre Cemetery, whose gloomy mausoleums could be seen to the right and left from the overpass, to the right and left a city of the dead; I pushed Clichy away from me, along with its many oyster crates in front of the restaurants and the usually chaotic traffic around the monument, as I rode along, I was now observing two bearded Jews who were hanging on to two handholds near the door and swinging like jumping jacks while they had an animated conversation, they always wear these narrow-brimmed dark hats, always have beards, and always wear these black, severely tailored coats that look like kaftans, I thought, and at the same time they have some quite normal profession, but always in this—religious?—traditional costume! it’s like leading a double life; and I observed their unusually lively, somehow inspired facial expressions, their conversation went on without a break as they swung back and forth, what were they talking about, now and then they laughed as if at a good joke; and I thought, now I’m riding along this stretch for the umpteenth time, I’m feasting my eyes on the same familiar sights, but I couldn’t possibly claim to know the area, at the very most I recognize it very superficially, LA CLÉ AU JUSTE PRIX, and everyone riding along in the same bus would get a completely different impression of the same part of the street, the same street, as many different images as pairs of eyes, now I saw the street as something unfathomable before me, as a Darkest Africa worthy of Living-stone & Stanley, impenetrable, and from this impenetrability all these eyes took different things into account, so long as there was light enough to see, and I saw the hollows and rifts broken into small pieces by all these beams of light, into light and shadow, the street was cut up into snippets of sound too, but for everyone it still bore the same name, Rue Guy Môquet, for example, who had he been, a name rubs off on a street, Rue Guy Môquet (also written Môcquet), in the eye
s of the two Jews, in the eyes of the woman whose shopping bags kept slipping down, in the eyes of the brooding Arab; I thought of the bit in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” where the American writer suffering from gangrene, awaiting death, thinks of everything he hasn’t gotten around to writing, he had always postponed the best things, now he would never write them; and among these precious things or subjects he had always meant to get around to describing, the thing at the top of his list was something banal: to my astonishment, to my shock, he spoke of the gurgling of the gutter and of the smells in the air and of the sounds at Place de la Contrescarpe, just as they had remained in the memory of his hero, and in his own memory, from the time when he had started to write next door on Rue Descartes, near the Panthéon; the first editions of his feelings at that time! yes, I thought, as I was riding along on the bus, he never got around to it, at least not on paper and on purpose, at most in a dream; since it can rise up again in a dream, we do have it in us, down to the smallest detail, we retain everything with heightened perception, but we never touch it again, unless in our sleep, I thought; and now I thought of Place Contrescarpe, I made the inner leap from the scene of my bus ride over to the region of the Panthéon; the thin, rational air around about this temple of dry thoughts and hard reason, a much drier, cleaner air than here, where everything smells and sweats and chatters; and right behind it the nice, messy little round park with tramps under the trees, and students and lovers sitting outside the cafés, it basically resembles the square of a small town in the country; and right nearby is the building where Verlaine died, where Hemingway wrote; from the Panthéon it’s just a stone’s throw to Jardin de Luxembourg, to the many people of leisure in the multicolored shade cast by the magnificently trimmed trees on the brown sandy soil, people taking a stroll under this canopy of trees, and people reading, thinking, talking on these ancient, charming, wrought-iron chairs, garden chairs set out for everyone; the cherubs and small statues of the gods playing hide-and-seek in the foliage, a merry-go-round with a white elephant circling around, as in Rilke’s poem, “und dann und wann ein weißer Elefant,” fountains, highbrow; “Ami, si tu tombes, un ami sort de l’ombre à ta place,” the song of the French Resistance, is written on a monument; down from “Boul Mich” and over the bridge onto Île Saint-Louis, the country palace impression of the houses along Quay Bourbon, massive paved inner courtyards with trees, and among the trees, statues, bronze statues larger than life, the heavy wooden door set in the front gate, and outside, the quay wall, I run my hand along the wall as I stroll past, the pavement is narrow here, a small sidewalk, I lean over the wall, down below by the water is the path along the shore for dogs, couples, fishers, yes, and tramps; recently I saw one lying on a bench, in ragged clothes, he was sleeping, and the urine ran through his pants, forming a stringy rivulet below the bench and running down to the Seine; which I greet from Pont Alexandre when I come from Esplanade des Invalides, on one side of the river the houses seem to be hanging down from the sky on threads, silhouettes light as air; but the flowing water from the bridge, there’s nothing nicer than peeing into a river from a bridge, a real feeling of elation; and now a pleasure boat comes along, Bâteau Mouche, and all the tourists’ enraptured faces gaping out through the protective glass with their mouths open, fish faces; and the poor man peeing on the bench who sees nothing, he’s asleep;
and on to Hôtel de Ville, the evening crowd on Rue de Rivoli, it’s dirty here, the real bazaar; bazaar, I think, right: across from Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, in the midst of the crowd, a young woman is running away, holding a child by the hand, running away from two men, she screams that they should leave her alone, shit, “laissez-moi donc, merde,” she screams, the men try to cut her off, block her way, grab at her; this is getting other people’s attention, they turn around, what’s going on here? Kidnapping, a crime, and right here in the midst of the evening crowd; the child that’s being dragged along, the innocent kid, you can’t just stand by and watch that, already a group of people from the crowd is wedged in between, the pursuers are getting embarrassed, one of them takes a transmitter out of his pocket, police? what? a detective? now people hear the word shoplifting, the woman has stolen something, a pair of gloves; she keeps on screaming to let her go, “lachez-moi,” the people get involved, almost all are on the woman’s side, having put the pursuers in the wrong, which makes them unsure of themselves, but they tug at the woman again, the child whimpers, now it bursts into tears, poor little mite, the crowd gets furious; now the woman escapes, her pursuers want to follow her, but the crowd blocks their way, let her go, you pigs, what’s the big deal, let her go, you mean bastards; the two give up, they also say “merde” and shrug their shoulders; the woman has run down the stairs to the Metro with the child and disappeared, escaped; the crowd continues discussing the incident, a well-dressed woman says, that’s not right, where would we be if everyone stole things; oh, shut your trap, says a coarse woman, it’s none of your business anyway; stupid cow, screams the upright woman; misery, says the other; the people disperse; that’s enough of that, I say to myself, that’s enough now; stop thinking about the city, you’ll never get it all together, you can’t think it, the city, every time you try it, you just chalk up another defeat, you can never HAVE it; you’ll never have it, I thought and pressed my nose to the window, where were we?
we were just riding past a little bar, a bar like a thousand others, there’s the round or long counter under neon light, in such a bar there’s always the feeling that one’s in a large arena, it’s always as colorful as a circus, I don’t know what creates that effect, maybe it’s because the weak red light in the tubes, at the lower end of the color spectrum, evokes the circus when reflected by the cream-colored walls; and at the bar the few men and women drinking beer, a small white wine, a ballon de rouge, a calva, before they go home, they stretch it out, have another, quickly; they stand under the lights at the bar as if under a halo, with the glockenspiel of bottles in the background, stand on the tiled floor with the cigarette butts and bread crumbs, stand devoutly in the light, in the prayer room, as if this were their only refuge, and now the bar is simply everything: café, pub, barbershop, drugstore, emergency ward, interrogation room, waiting room, field hospital, and chapel, CONSOLATION; all in one, the best shelter on earth, one more, one more ballon de rouge; they stand there as if enlightened, the miracle gets around;
as we drove along, I felt the narrowing and widening of the streets, like breathing out and breathing in, I felt it in my chest; and the streets merged with all the breads and cakes in the display cases, with turnips, lettuce, halved oxen and pigs, and bars, many bars, the street a child scurried across, a child sent quickly across the street to buy a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine;
that’s enough of that, I say to myself in the bus, turn it off; but I couldn’t turn it off, there was still something there inside me that didn’t want to settle down, that wasn’t satisfied, I thought, I should get off this bus that keeps riding on and on, ever farther through the darkness, I should get off and go ashore in one of these illuminated bars, stand at the trough or the counter, knock back a glass, or better, several glasses at once, otherwise you’re going to go crazy, I thought, but I knew I wasn’t crazy at all, just wide awake; and now this dream came to mind that I had dreamed several times of late; the dream was about a sentencing, a judgment; it was right before my final high school exams that would qualify me for university, and it became clear to me that I was never going to pass the math exam, I wouldn’t be able to demonstrate the requisite comprehension and thus the necessary ability for the required calculations with numbers, for solving equations, for the algebra, I couldn’t think straight, that much was utterly clear to me, and what that meant was that I would never get out of high school; I was doomed to fail, and so our ways parted then before we reached the gate, all my friends passed through the gate and went out into life, I too went out into life, but on a different, solitary path, I knew that for me one ent
rance would remain blocked forever; now, I said to myself in the dream and in view of my former friends disappearing into the distance, now I will be excluded from all of that and from them, but I won’t stay in school, I’ll run away without this special requisite know-how and go out into life; of course I’ll always be marked with this blemish, a sort of pariah, I’ll always be missing one key, but that doesn’t have to mean that I won’t find my way anywhere; this dream had astonished me, because in reality I did indeed pass my final high-school exams, even if I’d only just scraped through the math, I had slipped through and had even completed a university degree, all without particularly applying myself; but in the dream I hadn’t made it, in the dream I had the feeling, and the feeling had the authoritativeness of a death sentence, that I would be marked with this blemish like a curse or an illness for the rest of my life, and that I had to make up for this deficiency through a supreme effort in another field; in the dream, I hadn’t been at all without hope, just a little melancholy; but why was I dreaming here and now—at my age!—about having failed this exam? did it have to do with my feeling lost in the city, this obtuseness and melancholy resulting from that feeling, I wondered on the bus, if not the acute danger of an endogenous depression? might I have been able to approach the city differently through “mathematics,” might I indeed have been able to arrive? surely it couldn’t be a matter of rational understanding, or was that the case after all? would it have helped me if I’d been able to understand, to see through the city in its historical layers? if by virtue of the intellectual ability to reconstruct it the Gestalt of the city would have become not only understandable, but also transparent to me? would the city’s thousands upon thousands of faces then disappear, these faces that yield only darkness? could I in such a case put on the city like a cloak (if only, that is, I possessed this other key)? but, as it is, I’ll always have to piece it together, I told myself; is there a reading (of reality), a way of measuring it without losing the present, that unfathomable, puzzling aspect which, however, is essential to life: does such a complex answer exist, an answer that signifies both restoration in the sense of repair and an indestructible present?