My Year of Love

by Nizon, Paul.

  you, I told myself, have always been afraid of destruction, of the destruction of the puzzle, or of life, when you try to think and analyze; you prefer the atmospheric approach through touch and smell, through conjuring things up; and what you create is ultimately this eternal fog you can never see through; you aren’t looking for clarity; are you afraid of disillusionment? you never seek the “truth,” whatever that may be, you seek the darkness, the darkness of your mother’s womb;

  you correspond like a one-man telegraph office with the outside of the phenomenon, but in the end you fall back into the blackest black of the inside, because you can’t decode the incoming messages, can’t even count them, let alone process them; both your sender and receiver are constantly in turmoil, but you remain speechless;

  nevertheless, it frequently seems as if I have the word, the secret, on the tip of my tongue, I interjected; I’m often close to it;

  close to what, damn it?

  to a street, for example, so close to it; a Parisian street, magnificently drifting, which contains everything; I stand trembling with excitement in the middle of the street, and in its sugary, chalky facades, and in the sky between them, that patch of sky invented by this street, because the street engulfs it, the street gazes adoringly at me; I myself am the street, I am its carrier and wing; I am the fluttering of its flanks, the blinking of its Venetian blinds, the slate and sheet-metal hat on its roofs, the blushing of its skin, the grilles that veil its windows, I am the wrinkles, all the wounds and runes, I am all the darkening and brightening of its expressions, its countenance, that’s me, even if I don’t understand it; I am it and feel it;

  the breathing of the sidewalk at its feet; all the debris under the awnings, every single reflecting glass store window and what’s behind it, everything—

  I hang like a puppet from the thousands of strings, eye strings, mind strings, feeling and thought strings, connected to the street by these strings, its walls and cracks slip me its messages; I hang and wriggle on the strings that make me jerk, I’m a jumping jack; it pulls on me until I collapse, fall into the gutter, a lifeless thing that the sewage washes away; that’s the destruction, the darkening in the middle of the day, the darkening in the city; because I can’t say it; I feel it, but don’t understand; I can’t grasp it—

  and now I thought, while riding the bus: maybe it was this shutting of doors, this turning away, that drove me to women, wanting to be looked after; and now it occurred to me how in that summer, it was the hottest summer anyone could remember, a heat that brought us all down to the same level, glowing dryness with grass fires and forest fires, whole countries desperate for rain, a crooked street ran down from Rue des Abbesses in the direction of Boulevard Rochechouart, and down below there I saw a huge black whore sitting on the fender of a car; I was amazed that she could stand it, I thought to myself that her rear end must have been quite scorched already, I approached her and then followed her up an unspeakably stinking staircase into a bug-ridden partitioned room, it was stiflingly hot inside, this is where you’re going to catch the infection, I said to myself, as I stood there and watched her undress, she did so in the laziest manner imaginable, maybe because she was so tall—and it was so hot, and in that very moment my nose detected the roasting smell from a frying pan or the smell of hot fat, and with that smell I was suddenly back in my childhood, it was a mother’s smell, and I threw myself on the giantess, who called out something to me in her language, maybe she said, take it easy, man, not so rough, think of the thermometer! and then I walked back down the rickety stairs and loved the street and this city ardently, just as if I had been accepted, included, in any case, I belonged to it;

  and now my line of thought went back to that earlier time, when I had come here to visit Sandro Thieme in his summerhouse on Rue de la Tombe-Issoire; I had spent the day with him and had visited my aunt in the evening on Rue Condorcet below Pigalle, it had gotten very late, I was on my way home, walking along deserted and empty streets where everyone was already asleep, and then I heard an electrifying sound ahead of me, the clicking of high heels, the high heels staccato, I ran through the night, following the sound, and then, a shout ahead of me, I saw a swaying white satin dress in the blackness of the night, land! I’ve sighted land! I rejoiced, it was a black-skinned woman from Martinique, we climbed up the stairs of a hotel together, I took hold of her as we went up, and she rubbed her bottom against me good-naturedly, and for a long time afterward, all the next day, which I spent at Sandro’s, I could still smell her body, I held on to the smell and smiled at it in thought;

  I never could collect the city in me, whenever I tried to, it withdrew in the sparkling sea of a bursting fireworks display and was immediately extinguished, I could only ever participate in a small corner, a street corner, wherever I happened to find myself, I could never get into this city; you can never break in through the armored skin that so-called reality holds in front of you, at least not with any composure, so would I always remain outside? while I was right in the middle of it, would I remain outside?

  that’s enough of that, I thought in the bus, and now I was pleasantly tired from the ride; but riding, I thought, I like to do that for its own sake; even more than riding the bus, I like riding the Metro, because then I’m “inside” the city, in its bowels; I’m among the many who smell of rain, of moisture, of skin, of their district, of work or of leisure, of perfume, of poverty, of education, of danger, of wear and tear, of a dream or of fear, of meekness, of this city where they will have their day and pass away, and within each of them is a fragmentary perception of the city, but taken all together those perceptions would yield the sum that no one has yet been able to comprehend, life isn’t long enough for that; but in the rat runs of the Metro, in the bowels of the city, we are all in it, even if only in its excrement, mixed in with it;

  and then out of this submissive, dirty “having,” out of Hades, rolling up an escalator into daylight; one time in the Metro I saw only mouths, across from me the pursed lips of a black man; and women’s lips, all these embryos emerging—until I had to look away; and riding again through the long, round, tiled tunnels, their lighting casting this zebra pattern, this illusion of a ribbed vault on the ceiling, the notes of invisible musicians wandering through the corridors; and then the few stretches where the subway escapes the gullet and becomes an elevated railroad; suddenly the car is flooded by daylight, now I’m sitting as if in a circus ride and can see a street like this from above through the cast-iron struts of the overhead railway structure: the deep ravine into endless horror, the ravine that contains all colors, I say to myself: everything is there in the light, and as the long straight streets catch the light, everything is there, the sides with their hint of black from the ironwork below the windows and balconies, the pavement below shimmering with the luster of a baker’s oven, the low hat or helmet roofs, there! and the fire wall decorated with a huge advertisement that is flaking off and faded, and the high, narrow front of a corner house, the narrow cliff, on which the veins separate in the pointed corner; and the café under the awning and the few tables and chairs in front of it; the tree that mediates between its heavy trunk and its spiritual branches, not to forget the slapping flags of its leaves; and the parking car and the scream fading away and the body of someone who has just been stabbed to death and is dying by the curbside, a cadaver; and the couple having sex pressed against the wall; the whole-grain bread being taken across the street;

  and then again the craziest crowd of people, as dense and teeming and noisy as a colony of penguins, it’s the crush around the department store TATI at Barbès-Rochechouart; and back again into the gullet, into the entrails, into the dark;

  I’d like to ride on like this forever on my railway through the mountains and valleys, in order to remain in this HAVING, to have without possessing, I can’t express what you are, but I can traverse you;

  you’re not looking for clarity at all, I now hear the voice of my dear friend Beat, everything y
ou’re looking for is this feeling of Being Rocked in Darkness, you’re looking for darkness, little one, says Beat;

  you’re right, I say, that’s exactly it: I’m looking for the darkening oblivion that gives birth to memory; until in the middle of the day, in the middle of Paris, I can say: I remember, hello!

  When I was younger, I was always afraid of nightfall, for years, really, until quite recently, all told, I was still terribly afraid of the night. It was mainly the feeling of being cut off when the daylight disappeared, when nothing more would arrive, nothing more come to entertain me. It was like a power failure, everything stopped, no more listeners, no more speakers. Who am I? where do I belong? where should I want to be, hope to be? I no longer knew.

  The last time I experienced that feeling was in Serrazzano, a little place along the cliffs in the province of Pisa, where I had withdrawn to a vacant house belonging to some friends, almost ten years ago. I sat in this glassed-in veranda, by day it had a view of all the Tuscany Hills, and in good weather I could see as far as the ocean. I sat under the whitewashed beams that ran diagonally across the sloping ceiling; the floor was made of clay tiles in a pleasantly pale terracotta. When I pressed my nose to the window at night, I saw the stars and the crescent moon, otherwise blackness. I was sitting in a glass cockpit in the black night sky; in a very well furnished room: at the window there was a low sofa bed under a beautiful old ottoman quilt, close to the fireplace a group of armchairs and a table in the Bauhaus style, curved, springy steel and black varnished wood, all in a slightly decrepit state. It was a wonderful room, especially for working in, but first I had to fight against my fear of the night, which I thought I had long since overcome.

  So when I was first there I frequently drove to the neighboring villages to escape my feeling of being a prisoner, I drove, for example, to Larderello, a ten-kilometer drive along a winding road. There, the inn LA PERLA awaited me, a barracks-like wing of a building with a restaurant. Behind the illuminated door was the large, sparsely furnished bar area with an extra-long counter and several small tables. The first time I went there, I had chatted with an eighty-year-old, a regular, and in doing so, as if under some compulsion—why, actually?—my Italian had become much more broken than necessary, so our conversation took place in that emphatic diction that locals all over the world reserve for foreigners. There is an emphasis in the intonation as if every word is being spelled out, letter by letter, for the sake of making oneself understood. I found out that the man was eighty, got up every morning at six to take care of his hens and rabbits, had been drinking wine and smoking as long as he could remember, was never bored, always had something to do, and always came to LA PERLA in the evenings for a chat. I found out that his son had just retired. I found out that the old man had a television, that he regularly went to bed around eleven, that he wore a Swiss watch and was satisfied with it. We also spoke about the relationship between the lira and the franc. Outside, it stank of sulfur; there was a sulfur spring there, indeed a sulfur bath. Men came into the cold room out of the blackness of the night, they went to the bar to drink an aperitivo. At eight, not a moment earlier, there was something to eat. The young man at the bar put on a white waiter’s smock and led the gentlemen into the adjoining dining room. Then the owner came in too, with a sullen expression, he came from his private quarters with the look of someone who’d just gotten out of bed; later the cook also put in an appearance, a hugely fat woman, she wore a sort of nun’s habit, and she had what the owner was lacking, the ability to carry on a conversation, indeed endlessly. After the meal, the few guests went over into the adjacent room where there was a television. Once it showed an old French film about a penal colony, with Gérard Philipe. I had admired him as a schoolboy in Le Diable au corps (with Micheline Presle), it was a film that affected me very deeply at the time. After La Perla I drove home through the quiet countryside in the night. In my cockpit I turned the radio on right away.

  When I didn’t go to Lardarello, I could drive to Castagneto, or to Volterra, but both of those were longer trips, to which I seldom treated myself. In Volterra, in the vicinity of the cathedral, the door of a coach house was slightly ajar, revealing the front end of an elegant old Lancia, and only when I peeked inside did I see the grandiose black and silver cargo bed built to accommodate a coffin. Later, men cloaked and cowled in black came along, carrying funeral-procession staffs in their hands. And hardly was I back in Serrazzano than I scented the atmosphere of death there too. I felt it in the way people were standing together outside the entrance to a house, there was something in the air that gave one pause, something composed of fright and pain and curiosity. Later the villagers joined the procession. As I found out, it was for an old man who had committed suicide. People said he hadn’t gotten over the loss of his wife and had jumped out the window. He had lain there, just a little blood coming out his nose, but otherwise without visible injury. When his daughter arrived from Siena, people had kept quiet about the circumstances of his death, she was an unstable person. They pretended it had been a heart attack.

  I sat in my glass cockpit when the storms came, leaving me in the dark even during the day, I sat for days in a sea of mist, contending with the sounds of the storm in addition to the darkness, so I listened to the radio, to the announcer’s conversational voice, to the ads, the music. When the fog lifted, as the storms abated, I drove to Castagneto Carducci. The one, main bar, the central meeting place of the small town, was already surrounded in the early afternoon by the local personalities. Since there wasn’t much going on, they reacted to even the slightest hint of something happening as though it were part of some sinister conspiracy. Each of them played his assigned role on the stage of their small town. There was the somewhat corpulent, well-dressed, middle-aged man, an educated person, who emphatically greeted a gaunt nobleman, as if they hadn’t seen each other from time immemorial. And the village idiot went past, toeing in, a little stooped. His hair shorn short, his skull bare, and his eyes rather squinty, though these contained, at the same time, something of a cunning sparkle.

  Next to the Rosticceria, there was a very sophisticated old lady standing in front of a fruit stand, unable to make up her mind what to buy. The fruit smelled good, and the reddish buildings rose up like cliffs at the edge of the small town, and somewhere washing was fluttering in the fresh wind that came from the sea. There was a slapping sound like flags, like sails, the ocean sky tugged at the small town, as if it wanted to pull it away from its anchor and get it sailing, as if it wanted to engulf it. Something ripped off and broke away, and immediately there was a sense of departure in the air, and those left behind grew smaller and smaller, became indistinguishable, in the eyes of someone who was saying good-bye, as he drew farther and farther away.

  The old lady at the fruit stand was being difficult, indeed finding fault, she expressed various concerns, she had recently heard or read about cholera outbreaks. The matron behind the stand assured her that all her fruit was perfectly fresh, but the old lady remained obstinate. Then she paid an outstanding bill and sniffed around a while longer. And the change, is it for me? asks the matron. Not on your life! says the old lady, picks it up, dumps it into her purse, and walks off.

  The fear of nightfall, which I last felt in my friends’ house in Tuscany, didn’t bother me for a long time, but when I first moved to Paris, I developed this fear that my life was coming to an end, that my soul would stop breathing in and breathing out. I hadn’t yet properly arrived in my new life, or I didn’t have the courage to have arrived, on account of my wife. For a while we still spoke on the phone, but my wife’s voice always sounded like a reproach, and she didn’t bother to conceal her resentment, although I knew she had, in the meantime, rebounded and entered into an entirely new life of her own. I should have been relieved about that, and I was, but at the same time I held it against her that she had broken new ground so soon, as if she had taken something away from me, or as if the decisiveness of her new direction would retr
oactively prove our common history false. We refrained from calling from then on. Soon we would also be legally divorced.

  I was despondent, I was wriggling in the net of all sorts of anxieties, even hypochondria, I saw the awkwardness of my existence, I also saw the luxury of my situation, above all in comparison to the countless poorer people around me, but none of that helped, I was freezing. Sometimes I saw myself as someone already well on the way to being institutionalized, or as one of these figures who draw attention to himself on the street, because something, one doesn’t know what, isn’t quite right about him; there’s something, an indication of nobility, or even just a flowing mane, that doesn’t fit in with the poverty and especially the fear expressed by the rest of the person’s appearance, and it wouldn’t be surprising if someone pointed to the gentleman and remarked, that’s him, him over there, do you see him? he’s the one who once . . . do you remember now? that’s him . . . A has-been.