The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

  Now I think that girlhood in itself is a baroque condition.

  When the Irish actress returned to rue du Cherche-Midi, I moved on to another room, this one also a seventh-floor chambre de bonne reached by a another dingy back stair, but in a more elegant neighbourhood, near the Parc Monceau. It was owned by a graphologist of popular fame – she had a radio program where she analyzed intellectual celebrities by means of their autographs. Before she accepted my damage deposit, she assessed my own self-conscious scrawl. I had met her in the bookstore where I used to linger at evening. I can’t recall the sample sentence she asked me to copy out. Let us say it was this: As for the seduction of the game, what if it is indifferent to us whether we win or lose? The condition of transcription seemed unusual, but no more so than any other of the agreed-upon daily rituals I awkwardly attempted to reproduce. I suppose I passed her little test. This room, deep and narrow and dim like the last, had the almost shocking luxury of its own hand basin and water heater. There was a small window, an adequate bed, a chair, a narrow brown formica folding table, and a wardrobe. These were the graphologist’s cast-offs. I recall a gently buckling faux wood-grain linoleum on the floor. I stored my books and my wine in the wardrobe with my few clothes. I had a bottle of Youth-Dew perfume from Estée Lauder, a gift from my grandmother, and I still associate the room with the heavy, pungent scent of civet and rose and clove. She had sent it in a little string-tied parcel, wrapped protectively in fragments of tissue-paper sewing patterns, the black outlines of the garment parts carefully clipped to include the graphic tabs that showed how to bring the fragments together to make a whole: a dress, a jacket, a new, better-clothed life. Always now the thought of the perfume in its cheap fluted glass bottle with gold paper label brings me back to that shitty room, its darkness, the blue typewriter on the folding table, the bad linoleum, these traits a carapace camouflaging a small freedom that gently expanded inside me like a subtle new organ, an actual muscular organ born of my own desire for what I took to be an impossible and necessary language. Its sillage was an architecture.

  I remember that the beige wallpaper was embossed rather than printed, with the pattern of wicker basketry. Above my table, bordering the rough diagonal shape left by a torn-off shank of that paper, I tacked up three black-and-white postcards: August Sander’s ‘Secretary at West German Radio, Cologne,’ from 1931, her crisply shingled modern hair, cigarette, and aloofly hunched posture somehow at odds with the shiny black embroidered dress, which seemed to me to have been borrowed or handed down; Colette in middle age, leaning quizzically to one side, her glittering eyes heavily outlined in her signature kohl, in the foreground a large bouquet of out-of-focus dahlias; and a studio portrait of an elderly and monastic Georgia O’Keeffe, her grey hair tightly pulled back, and her black kimono-like jacket showing a crisp edge of white shirting. Like the street singer, the secretary was nameless. She had become her function. The part of her that refused this calculation held a cigarette. I found the three postcards very pleasing; I admired the effect of the diagonal, staggered line of small black-and-white images, which articulated the room’s poorness. Also, though, I wanted to be witnessed. I considered that these three would help me to think. Influenced by the image of Colette, by Steichen I think, I sometimes bought tulips to put in the tall waterglass, and they would splay out and downwards on their long, weak stems, grotesque beside the bed in the dim light. I would take black-and-white photographs of them, a little blurred by long hand-held exposures. That spring I put tulips in all my poems. They were fists, they were cunts, they were clocks.

  I found another menial job. A bourgeois man, a father, had approached me in the bookshop with an offer. It was the winter that I liked to go to the café to order port in its thick little stemmed glasses. I was slightly tipsy and I accepted; it felt so buoyant to say yes. I was to collect his young daughter from Hebrew school, take her home on the bus, and cook her lunch. There were two soldiers holding machine guns flanking the school’s entry, which was at the rue Copernic synagogue, and I was to tell them a password in order to enter. I did not note it in my diary, but I wish I could remember it now. There had been a terrorist bombing five years previously at this synagogue, in 1980, and five people had died, and forty-four were injured, just as two years later there would be an attack killing six and injuring twenty-two, with machine guns and a grenade, at Goldenberg’s, the Russian deli in the Marais where we would go to drink little icy vodkas with pickled fish. A year after that, a bomb killed five and injured fifty-one outside the Tati discount department store on rue de Rennes, the one where I bought a coffee pot and other small domestic items for my first room on the rue du Cherche-Midi. In that year, 1986, there were two dozen bombings in nine months, in post offices, book shops, metro stations, and shopping centres, all with connections to southern Mediterranean politics. Some of the attacks were anti-Zionist, or anti-Semitic, or both, carried out by organized supporters of Palestinian national groups. Some were claimed by the clandestine anarchist anti-imperialist group Action Directe; others by leftist Jewish anti-Zionist groups. Still others were presumably executed as acts of retaliation for France’s support of Iraq, by pro-Iranian organizations; this was the case with the Tati store bombing, when just before lunch on a school holiday, the street filled with women and children, bombs were thrown from a passing car into the crowds milling around the sidewalk displays of cheap children’s clothes. In those years there was a quotidian feeling of suspense and alert. At the rue Copernic synagogue I waited with the mothers in the new foyer, which had replaced the bombed-out one, until the children came running down the stairs. The girl came to me and held my hand.

  After lunch at the family apartment I was to do the ironing and dusting while the girl played quietly. The linens would be dampened and rolled, waiting for me in an unused bidet. I was not bad at ironing. This was a household of dinner parties, so always there were napkins and tablecloths to press. There were ladies’ blouses; the mother had gone back to work. I was here to replace certain of her domestic functions. Later, reflecting on my career in domestic labour, I would realize that the wife’s role in the bourgeois household was so vast, so specialized, thorough, complex, and ornate all at once, that no single woman could perform the entire task. So the role of the wife was spatially distributed amidst an expanding circle of other females, some amateurs, some specialists, some fakes like me. We were paid for it, but not much. This was a household too of rare books, first editions, of collections of crystal paperweights and deep vermillion carpets. There was asymmetrical modern furniture that left me uncertain where to sit. Now I think that the strange and wonderful settee resembling a vaulting horse was by Zaha Hadid. I would polish the crystal glasses the mornings after dinner parties while reading pages of Richard Aldington’s Boccaccio, thinking it rare. There were painted life-sized statues of mythical animals, and papier-mâché statues of shoeshine boys; there was a large fish tank with an eel-like creature crawling along the fine gravel at the bottom. This fish tank cast a dull greenish light that still dominates my imagination of that apartment and its relationships. The grey-blue cat would crouch on the hood of the stove looking down as I cooked the girl’s veal cutlet. The father boasted to me of his several mistresses, one of them, in London he said, with another child. As proof of his prowess he displayed to me the jangling keys to the mistresses’ doors, which he kept in his suit’s inner pocket together on a single fob. I would be paid 270 francs per week, he said. I could cover my rent and drink in cafés. This was good.

  Sometimes the little girl’s best friend would come for lunch. I would watch the two play together as I ironed. They wore tidy blouses tucked into stiffly pleated woollen skirts, sturdy shoes, and plastic hairbands. Sometimes they played chess until frightfully they knocked over all the chessmen and shouted and struck one another. They would erupt into jealousy at the lunch table; one of them said she would go for lunch chez une autre copine. – Quelle copine? Then ruthlessly tease the Burmese cat with its l
eash. The day before, the leash had been a harness, one girl the driver and the other the horse following commands, veering madly between the decorative papier-mâché figures. C’est moi qui est la maitresse ici, she said the first day I arrived, and she would sing children’s songs in a high-pitched voice as I individually dusted the leather bindings of the books in the library. She would cling and kiss. When I read the picture book Babar aloud to her, familiar stories of elephants enacting colonial domestic rituals, she would fastidiously correct my French pronunciation, which was helpful. The lighting was kept very dim to protect all the rarity. There were special blinds. The girls played in the half-dark. Their games expressed all the muted power and violence inscribed in the rooms of that dark apartment, its objects and surfaces and collections, and also in the spaces outside the apartment, in the city; the confining luxury constrained them to play out the erotic catastrophes of their parents as well as family histories and political damages and hatreds that I witnessed in the streets. The collections made a decor of the undersides of these stories. None of us had any choice, neither the children nor me. Yet in a mild, noncommittal way I disliked the children, and the parents, and my tasks. I did this sort of work because it was the work I had been raised to do, but I did it resentfully and badly. My gender, my poorness, and my foreignness were the job’s only prerequisites. I was a sloppy, myopic domestic, one small component of the sprawling, mostly invisible assemblage known as ‘wife.’

  I would often be told at the last moment that I was not needed. Indeed I was very replaceable, not very serviceable. Other domestics would perhaps do their work more cheerfully, more carefully. My permanent frown lines, heavy perfume, and tense, badly timed gestures disqualified me from seamless performance. I was often sullen. I had the wrong attitude, a condition that has apparently accompanied me for my whole life. Many have reminded me of this. ‘The maid doesn’t want to,’ Sandrine Bonnaire slurs, playing the vagabond Mona in Varda’s Sans toit ni loi as a profoundly decadent Bartleby. I would sometimes arrive at the apartment early, well before the girl’s lunch, in order to take a clandestine bath, my own room having only the hand basin, and the concierge would notice, shooting me a look of contempt. I would often use my employer’s better perfume, L’Air du Temps, reasoning that the bottle was so huge she would never know. I would sip from her crystal decanter of port at noon. I had yet to find a job that did not inadequately award my subservience. This made me perfectly feminine. Yet I had come to this city to appear to myself, to seek some kind of new language, not to iron tablecloths. I needed to keep this fact hidden most of the time.

  The apartment was a scaled-down model of the city. Those tight rooms first exposed me to the domesticity and decor of wealth and the erasures and contradictions it masked. Everywhere there was damage. In the rooms filled with rarity and the dullness of familial hatred and jealousy, in the now-forgotten password spoken to the armed soldiers at the school, in the prying glance of the concierge, in the horrible statues of shoeshine boys, all of these things functions of varying scales of imposed and policed positionings of superiority, I thought I could intuit the whole sadistic spectrum of the political world. It was heavy with grief. This sensation was not aesthetical; it was the enforced affect of the sex of a political economy, of masked histories of colonialism, of the ugliness of wealth. My dream of grace, the difficult ideal I struggled towards in sex and in paintings, my unformed language for this feeling that was trying so mawkishly to become a life, would have nothing to do with what passed for luxury. But it couldn’t be anchored by sadness either. I felt sure that beauty could only be slovenly and that love also could only be a slut. I suppose I simply reacted against the expectation of subservience. The only truth I knew was the truth of mendicant girls whose names were dismissed, the truth of linguistically fastidious girls who fiercely knocked over the chessmen and sang. I did not have to like any of it but I could admire their intrinsically exciting horseplay with its monstrous inner force.

  Slowly sipping a nourishing glass of beer on the terrace at le Narval on rue Saint-Jacques in late afternoon in the autumn of 1985 while reading the TLS: at this moment I felt like a gentleman scholar obeying the clock of ages as the marvellous clouds passed over. In the diminished scale of my economic existence, the beer could replace lunch, I’d discovered; the TLS could replace university. Wittgenstein, Guy Davenport, Zukofsky, post-structuralism – they each originated in those crisp, fine-set newsprint pages on a terrace. I could buy a fresh outfit if for a week I didn’t eat lunch. I had a new teal-green suit I’d just changed into in the café toilet, carefully stepping out of my winter corduroys over the squatting hole before pulling up the slender skirt that at once made me feel like Colette. The jacket fell loosely from boyish padded shoulders to hips accentuated by the peplum-like flare of two diagonal pockets, and the fabric was a textured viscose weave that swung fluidly when I walked. It was an eighties vision of the forties, I think, by way of cheap Thierry Mugler or Claude Montana knock-offs. I took my place on the terrace. We were the clock, in our costumes and our habits, in our admiration for the simplicity of a system. There was a kind of nobility in it: insupportable nervous troubles, dusk, art, outfits, swiftening, disobedience.

  The suit was a fictional garment that I liked to wear with a beret of the same colour. This green was the colour of my eyes in anger. When I say the suit was fictional I mean that it expressed one variation of a code, not to entrench me in a grid of meaning, as semiotic interpretations of fashion would have it, but to assist me in an unnamed metamorphosis. I hadn’t then decided how to become that other thing, which here I will call for the sake of brevity a poet, but indecision did nothing to lessen my vehemence about it. I had not learned the ordinary, workaday devotions; I sought a mystic portal. I was practising versions of an intensity I supposed necessary to my ambition, an earnest desire that had found in Walter Pater a little ledge of language to perch upon for a while: ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame,’ as he said, in his conclusion to The Renaissance, ‘a clear perpetual outline at the core of everything mutable.’ I thought I’d find the gem in sex, this being an available mythology for the seeking and sensual girl. But mostly the fleshy tempests, which I had taken to be at the heart of my research, amounted to ornate flickerings. I began to suspect that, after all, such tempests were the grid, extending outwards in a metric repetition of the beauty problem that would permit only the most asinine deviations from the assigned roles in the drama. Next, reactively, I thought I’d found the gem in solitude. The word itself had a gorgeous, monkish allure. But what I called solitude lacked neutrality; it too was guarded by the stout wall of personality that I had no way of dismantling. Both sex and solitude fizzled with aphoristic recklessness. The strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of myself, as Pater referred to it, would continue. There was no one position that could reveal to me the seemingly occult passage to the desired metamorphosis; I had not yet discovered the innate monstrosity of pronouns, nor the freeing boredom of repetition, and what did I impatiently burn for? Something like an initiation or a revelation; to emerge one late morning from my chambre de bonne into a city that had overnight become the supple kaleidoscope of a female thinking. As it was, I made do. There was no dramatic metamorphosis, not that I could perceive in my daydreams or in my typewritten poems or in my diary. Yet in the city I was discovering, the collage of fantasy, pigment, quotation, and architecture that I walked through daily in my outfits and my obsessions, I came to notice small-scale transpositions, tiny openings within the texture of the present, where choices towards a freed thinking could be possible. Now I am not sure if these little tropes would be part of poetry or of philosophy. In truth I did not fully distinguish between the two; each was a baroque accretion of my body in the city. Doing philosophy would be the annotation of the present-tense irruption of my body in the city or in reading. Doing poetry would be renaming oneself as the heiress of a linguistic infraction.

  The distinction between inner and outer
worlds was becoming permeable and supple, like a fabric, which is in its very technical constitution both structure and surface. Painting, fashion, reading, dalliance: observing, and describing the surfaces of appearing, was giving me information about my mind and its desire. A movement in thinking was possible. Writing would be work that changed the rhetorical conditions of I-saying. My awareness of this soft border developed slowly, through error and habits of loitering, and yet I intuited it all at once, as soon as I arrived at the hotel called the Future. Both versions are true. How else does one know anything, except by simultaneous and mutually contradictory means? Like heavy silk, the inner world draped, folded, pooled, spilled over to embellish or seduce the outer world, which in turn frayed, abraded, tore, revealing the structure of the division as contingent, and so erotic. I was already becoming the city; when I went to look at paintings they were made in the same folds of light I walked through. The discretion of edges dissolved. My cognition moved more freely among the streets and bridges.