by Nizon, Paul.
It was late at night when I arrived back in Paris, and even before going to my apartment, I climbed the hill to Sacré-Cœur. The city lay at my feet in ghostly illumination, vaguely glittering, whole sections glowing.
In the following days I climbed up to Sacré-Cœur in the mornings and the evenings, I went there as if I had to perform morning and evening prayers. I looked out over the hanging parks, embraced by staircases, the snowy mosque, the domes of the church behind it, looked out over the sea of buildings—to the bared teeth of the satellite in the hazy distance. But between the sea of buildings, sometimes it seemed to be a sea of glaciers, there was an icily shimmering stalactite landscape. On other days and at other hours the sea blossomed into thousands of breakers, those were the whitish, ocherous, gray backs, the backs of the walls with the slate-gray brows of their roofs, sometimes they emerged from purple clouds as from the pool of creation, and the white was the most spiritual white, a white like clown’s make-up, like Chinese white. It was the endless city, and I remembered the streets and squares, their names, I remembered how it was down on the pavement and at the markets, I remembered the people, their stories, their fates being whispered by the stone.
I’ll never get hold of you, don’t turn me away, accept me: city, your prisoner.
BUT WHERE IS LIFE, I ASKED MYSELF ANXIOUSLY in my boxroom, sitting at my table with my view of the old dove man who now sent his doves over to me. Yes, it had recently begun to seem as though he was amusing himself by chasing the unwelcome doves in my direction with dismissive hand gestures. I didn’t react.
Where was life? It was at the corner in the form of the people standing there; it was transported through the underground tunnels in the Metro and shoveled up into the light; it took me into its arms in the discreet rooms of the maisons de rendez-vous; it glided across the television screen; it hid itself in the city; it ran through my thoughts. But was I taking part in life? I shared neither the hopeless material circumstances of the immigrants in my neighborhood, nor the questions of the intellectuals in the brighter districts, I didn’t take part anywhere, not even in the political life of this nation to which I did not belong, I didn’t participate, I sat in the prison of my room, clung to paper, bent over my typewriter, intent on putting something down that would be lasting or at least would be seen, something I could hold on to. I often had the feeling that I wasn’t so much living here as simply being allowed to live—just as the tramp on the bench passed water. And yet I had come here to win life.
Life is to be lost or gained, I had pretentiously maintained when I had met that girl who’d infected me with this love poisoning. It happened on a trip abroad, we had been introduced, and now we were sitting in a circle of people we knew and didn’t know in a Greek bar, drinking and talking and drinking, and suddenly the girl I didn’t know at all directed a request to me, say something, she said; I thought, what does she mean by say, what can I say to her, we barely know each other, good gracious, what does she mean. Say something, she repeated, and so I said, I have no idea why, that same sentence, I said, I think I have nothing to say, there is nothing to say, unless it’s that life is to be lost or gained.
And in the same night we slept together, but I knew right away it was no affair, this was no passing affair, nor was it simply communication, a “conversation with our hands on the other peron’s body,” no, it was destruction and revelation at the same time, I didn’t know what was happening to me, but ever since then the word UNIO has been going around in my head, I don’t know if this word was there because for the first time in my life I had experienced such a fusion, what’s probably meant by the word “marriage,” or whether it had only just occurred to me at that moment that there could really be such a thing. I drove home poisoned, and at home I told my wife what had happened to me, I had to say what was on my mind, because I knew that every cell of my physicality announced it with the utmost clarity, it couldn’t be kept a secret, the entirety of my changed being expressed it.
I stood before my beloved wife and had to confess the dreadful truth. After that, we sat for nights confronted with our broken marriage. I cried with my wife, but I thirsted for my beloved so much that I had to see her again right away. We arranged to meet in Paris, and we spent three days in Hôtel du Paradis, Place Emile Goudeau. It was early spring, the room was awful, a narrow room with faded wallpaper, a door that hung crookedly and never really shut properly, a narrow bed and a curtain that billowed in the wind. I can still see the curtain in my mind’s eye, I see the two of us in this room running to the window with our naked bodies, and from the window, looking out over the city, over the sea of buildings. I passed through all states in those nights, sometimes I woke up with a start and heard myself talking in a loud voice to my wife who had stayed behind, talking in our language, which my beloved did not understand. There was a mild wind blowing on those nights, an early spring arriving, the wind changing direction from one moment to the next. Once I looked out our window at two high attic windows in a building farther downhill, I just saw a part of each picture. In the one window, a studio window, I saw the powerful arms of a man eating and pouring himself a glass of wine, I just saw one corner of the table and part of the man who was eating, but it was still enough for me to be able to imagine that he was an artist, enjoying a late meal after finishing his work, and I imagined his studio with the equipment for his work, I imagined his working life, the simplicity, the honesty, the courage to live that way. In the other window, I saw an old man lying in bed, and at his side a child who was reading aloud to him from a book. These window pictures weren’t hallucinations, these pictures of people in different stages of life, the sick man who might die soon and the creative artist, the two of them impressed themselves upon me, back then in PARADIS. That’s what I saw, I, who was satisfying my hunger for a food that I hadn’t even known existed until then.
We parted in the early morning at Gare de l’Est. It was raining, we walked silently side by side, like convicts. A few months later, I moved definitively to Rue Simart.
When I stood at the window of my boxroom and stared out into the courtyard, it was usually late at night when I stood there, because during the day I was afraid of closer contact with the old dove man, so I kept well back; when I stood at my open window and stared down into the now deathly quiet courtyard and at the cracked, disintegrating walls, I felt the pain of this love as a deprivation, as a gnawing pain in my heart, and I thought that this feeling was the most real, and thus the most precious, the strongest that I possessed. Let it run wild, but let it last, I thought.
Where is life? I had sighed in Zürich, when I sat at my ironing table and hammered away at my typewriter in the building with the two teachers and the hunchbacked Fräulein Murz; I thought, this lowly and subservient life in Zürich gets more worn out by the day and holds no more secrets for me; I thought, this worn-out life can’t be all there is to living, and I dreamed of another country, of a scene where life would come at me like a thundering cavalcade on the street and trample me underfoot; and then it would touch me again, and I’d feel as I had in earlier years, when everything seemed full of miracles and adventures, pain and enlightenment.
I had given up my workroom in the building in the old part of the city with its hunchbacked genius loci, and had moved in with an artist in another district. The large studio, six-by-ten meters with windows high up, had been promised to me, but the painter was to have access to it until he could move to his new place; in the meantime, I was to make use of the adjoining rooms, which he offered to me so that these quarters, which I regarded as extremely desirable, would not be lost to me. I worked for almost an entire year with the painter in the studio. Until then, I had known him only by sight. He was called Karel S., had penetrating, sometimes slightly squinty eyes in a round, bearded face, was stocky, and carried the paunch of a heavy drinker in front of him.
Usually, I was home in our studio apartment before him, then the door opened, and Karel ambled silently in on his s
hort legs and bear paws, carrying two bulbous Chianti bottles in his arms, four liters, his daily ration, but he didn’t start with the wine right away, he put the bottles aside, went into the kitchen, where he brewed up some herbal tea for himself, poured a mouthful of herbal tea into a soup bowl with handles and then filled it up the rest of the way with wine, this mixture was his breakfast, but after he had drunk the blend, he carried on with wine alone until he was blind drunk and had his marvelous, pre-Christian, heathen sleep.
I liked Karel a lot, he was wise, he knew about medicinal herbs, spices, juices, and he got along well with animals. He could stick his arm up to the shoulder into a horse’s mouth without getting bitten, and he bewitched or calmed the most vicious dogs by going right up to them with his penetrating gaze, and the dogs began to whine and lay down for him. Some of them started to lick his hand right away. Incidentally, he had this power not only over animals and plants but over people as well. It was wonderful living with Karel, he was extremely sensitive, neither coercing me to join him in his excessive drinking nor bothering me when I was working. When I sat at my big ironing table, I felt secure in the knowledge that my Karel was present in the next room, the gymnasium-sized painter’s studio, between the paintings he was working on and all the countless, inexplicable pieces of equipment that make up a painter’s household, whether he was painting or not, drinking or not, in his case I never had nasty situations like I’d had with poor Florian, and I would never even have entertained the thought that Karel should be working or not working, I paid no attention, whether he was producing anything or not: he was a Magus, in touch with the miraculous, he had a sixth through eighth sense, he could talk with every living creature and with dead things, and he could sleep like a master. He slept for months on end, and when his wife phoned, I became accustomed to lying, I said, he’s just gone out on an errand, do you want him to call you back? His wife had a real fear of being stuck with an alcoholic for a husband, and when friends occasionally brought him home unconscious, or when he was dropped off in that state by a good-natured taxi driver, she sometimes locked him out, thinking that such measures would deter him, that she was doing him a service.
Karel’s father had been a shoemaker and a drinker, had had a pet chicken and a pig who lived with him in his shoemaker’s and drinker’s workshop, keeping him company, and on the occasion of one family get-together, when not only the entire clan, but also the local Catholic priest were gathered together at the long table in the garden, the whole long table, set with the bowls and plates and glasses and food, suddenly tipped over, because the pig was trying to take its place at Karel’s father’s feet, it must have been a sizeable, pink, pinkish-gray pig.
Karel came from the country, he also knew mushrooms really well, and he knew about medicinal herbs, but for himself, that is, as far as alcoholism went, he knew of no cure, the mixture with the herbal tea didn’t do a drop of good, and later on, Karel left us several times for withdrawal treatments, from which he returned as if from a fountain of youth, having lost his paunch, and with his skin looking as healthy as a young girl’s, but the cure never lasted more than a few weeks, soon he took up his old habits again.
Downstairs in the building was a tobacco shop run by Fräulein Weishaupt. When I went into the shop, I always did my best to open the door carefully, so as not to hit it against the parrot’s cage that stood on a rather high pedestal right inside the shop door. The parrot had one claw lifted up as high as its head, and its head tilted to one side, the better to scrutinize the newcomer. I breathed in the scents of the various tobaccos and spent a while browsing the paperback books in their stand, and then Fräulein Weishaupt came out of the back room and walked toward her customer, her small eyes blinking, she always gave that impression, as though she was coming out of the dark into blinding daylight. But the blinking had nothing to do with weak eyes, she blinked as she was sizing up the customer, and this kept him at a distance, it had more to do with skepticism and pride. Fräulein Weishaupt was a resolute person who had an arrogant streak. She studied people, and was always waiting for something extraordinary, but she only seldom found an interlocutor she considered worthy of hearing her own, that is Fräulein Weishaupt’s, well-considered opinions. Besides having the parrot, she may have devoted herself to some passion or science, such as gambling or for-tune-telling or spiritualism. But she was definitely also kind.
A few steps from our run-down building, which was already slated for demolition, there was a tall office building, and in front of it was a narrow island with a lawn and a few trees. This island of greenery, which looked like a doormat in front of the cold concrete colossus, was presumably left over from what had once been a park, which had been engulfed by the modern business fortress and covered over with concrete; I drew this assumption because of its massive old trees. It was the closest piece of greenery, and this leaf-green always made me pause for breath, I sucked my lungs full, especially when it was raining, I sucked the whole tree in, as if I could effectively stave off starvation due to lack of happiness. I don’t know what kind of happiness that tree held, likely a childhood happiness, when I looked up into the effervescence of young leaves, yes, let it rain, I thought, and sucked in the smell of the rain, there was something contagious about it, a note of alarm, there were no more chestnut trees like that around here, it was a universe of a tree, I stretched up toward the foliage that was scaled and layered in so many different ways, as I let the dog sniff the lawn; even more than the chestnut tree, my dog loved the cedar, he could never sniff the rough bark of its trunk long enough, and inside, behind the glass of the ground-floor rooms of the high-rise, I saw the distinguished computer programmers, both men and women, going about their business, and they probably noticed the man with the dog, perhaps even joked about him, or envied him the time and leisure to let his dog graze while he looked up into the planets of the leaves, where white candles were already growing.
At my table I often got that tormenting feeling of being deserted that one suffers as a child. Then I seemed to be in an adjoining room to life, cut off from everything. I got down to writing, it was as if I would only be capable of seeing, of breathing, of communicating by writing; as if the day I had not captured in writing had not been a day at all. My day today will only be my day tomorrow if I recall it in a different setting.
If I don’t note things down, everything remains unreal, I thought. Being in a foreign country can take possession of me in such a threatening manner that I fear I’ll gradually die in the midst of life. Taking notes was both a desire to write myself into something, as well as a desire to write myself out of something: out of being split off, and into life. I abandoned myself to the language, the sentences, the parlando, as to a sleigh that would carry me there.
The fear of dying also explains that other urge which occasionally causes me to drift off course, not only into an outer life, but also into the life of a drinker, into a life of destruction and self-destruction, it’s a danger, this urge is the urge to deaden my senses. Is it the fear of falling away from what feeds me, that is, from contemplation? Is it necessary for the pendulum to swing between this getting out to let life hit me over the head (until it reverberates like the edge of a forest in summer, as if a tuning fork had been hit) and then the retreat back inside, must the outer wasteland alternate with the inner tomb? The act of climbing up, as if from the depths, coated with mud, hung with algae . . . Does one have to attain a state of drunkenness, a state of drowning, a state of emergency, in order to really write? Do I always have to have a crisis first?
Life is to be lost or gained. I’m looking for it. When I say I’m looking for life, I mean that I’m looking for what it takes to be alive, to be awakened, for the awakening, yes, the awakening! To be awakened from the state of someone fighting for reality in the midst of chaos or apprehension, ennui, melancholy, hopelessness, lethargy. I throw myself into life as I cling to my writing, and in the sense of someone begging to be wrapped up in life, to be flooded w
ith it, awakened, distracted from my writing yet again; and then I am distracted from life by collecting things to write about to restore my self-confidence. I flee a few steps out into life because I’m afraid of being cooped up in my room, and outside I long to be writing because I’m concerned about my source of income.
I sit in this boxroom as if on standby. Waiting.
I’ve just applied dubbin to my two favorite suitcases. The one, Bassano’s old leather suitcase, as I’ve called it, comes from London, or, more precisely: from a store for “lost property” in Bloomsbury, I bought it in 1968, specifically because of its unique, long and narrow shape, it looks like an instrument case, has a width of about the German Industrial Standard A4 paper size, which is 220 by 297 mm, but it also looks like a maidservant’s small suitcase, especially when it’s opened, the inside is lined with gray ticking. It was badly scratched, but the leather was of a quality that inspired trust. Over the years, it has nevertheless become rather dilapidated, it started disintegrating, turning into dust, especially at the corners and edges, which is why, when I carried it around with me, my pant legs were always covered with red dust, as if I had waded through knee-high pollen. Finally, it fell apart at the seams, literally. I recently had it patched up, now the seams are reasonably strong, and since I’ve applied dubbin to it, it’s shiny and smooth. I’m attached to the thing in an almost superstitious way.
I purchased the other manuscript case even earlier, in 1965 I think, on Bahnhofstraße, Zürich’s main drag, in an old, established leather-goods store by the name of Lilian that was having a clearance sale, it was at a time that I was in dire financial straits. Maybe I didn’t need a case, but it was probably necessary to maintain my defiant attitude, I borrowed the money and spent it on this luxury item that was made to last, I invested in a life on the move and sneered at security.