The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  During my stay in Egypt I had more than anything else taken advantage of the presence of the friend I had rejoined: conversations, reading, walks in the streets of Old Cairo, excursions in the environs (on the motorbike with which my companion had traveled through Syria a short time before), the inception of a poetic novel that I had baptized Aurora and in which I was trying to give form to my torment had sufficed to occupy me. Having gone, in sum, for a cure and with rather slender financial means in a country where the cost of living was high, I led a sedentary life, encouraged, in addition, to visit almost nothing by a hostility in principle toward tourism, an activity in which the reverence it involved for the high products of culture seemed to me incompatible with surrealism. Of the little I had seen, what had moved me the most was, without a doubt, the outlying site of Cairo from which the eye discerns, along with the flight of rapacious birds, the ashy monuments that are the tombs of the ancient khalifs and down at the very bottom, stretching out as though at the foot of a cliff, an incredible swarm of modest houses that look as though they have been gnawed to the bone by calcination and penury. Seeing, far off, the town minced with light . . . said Apollinaire, speaking of dazzled eagles and sketching, in a line, a marvelous picture that it seemed to me was realized here.

  As soon as the Anglo-Egyptian boat that was taking me from Alexandria as a bridge passenger was within sight of Piraeus, the perspective changed: the Greeks on board jostled one another to see the Acropolis, and this joyous tumult swept away in a single stroke my preconceived ideas; I was arriving not in a country decked out in its Sunday best of colonnades but in a fully living country, where the very image of the Parthenon—pale in the luminous sky—received me in a summer dress rather than in a Renan-style frockcoat. Being alone now, I had nothing else to distract me but to visit this country my predispositions against which had dropped away and, more at ease materially than I had been in Egypt, I could walk here and there in complete freedom. I made ample use of it, and, sometimes over land and sometimes over sea (in skiffs whose flotation seemed a matter of chance as much as of engineers’ calculations), I went all over the place, no longer reading anything but the Guide bleu (the only book that I had brought away with me when I left Egypt), inspecting ruin after ruin, going from antiquities to Byzantine constructions or to vestiges of the Crusades and, in certain little-frequented spots, arousing the curiosity of the peasants, who asked me if I was looking for treasures. Most often, our means of communication was the rough English introduced by the emigrants who had returned from America, those they called “Ameriki,” certain of whom showed off their provenance beyond the Atlantic either by smoking fat cigars and wearing boaters with saw-tooth edges, or by sticking the star-spangled banner on the roof of the house that had just been built for them. Whereas I had not had any real contact with the Egyptians (in fact having nothing but antipathy for the pretentious bourgeois of Cairo), I felt on an equal footing with the Greek population as soon as I was outside the capital, a commercial city with beautiful neighborhoods too proud of the white marble that gives their buildings a nasty look of being newly rich. Sometimes, seeing me all dusty and sweaty in the course of an excursion I was making on foot for pleasure as well as out of a concern to save money, a peasant would invite me to rest in front of his door and, too hard up to offer me any wine, would bring me a glass of water. I held conversations, after a fashion, with the people I met in trains and one of them—a man visibly very poor—once insisted on making me a gift of a pencil he had on him, as a souvenir of a few hours spent in the same compartment trying to make ourselves understood. There were hardly any places or any situations in which the note of hospitality was not sounded. A tobacconist from Athens, a mature man who liked to speak French and had been my table companion for a certain time in a small restaurant in Nauplia, put me up for a few days at his sister’s home in a mountain village of which the latter’s husband was the mayor and where he himself was welcomed for the end of his vacation. It was here that I heard, sung by shepherds in kilts, a long epic tale the subject of which was the following: the great Marcos Botzaris is dead and his companions, in great trouble, come to his tomb to ask his advice; a coryphaeus lends his voice to the shade of the deceased rebel, whom the whole of the chorus questions. On a second-rate steamer that was ranging the coast of the Peloponnesus and which, coming from Sparta, I had taken at Gytheion (where a small fort dating from the Turks reminded me of the crenelated papier-mâché fortified castles that children play with), a warm bond was established between me and the captain, who, toward the end of the trip, since there was almost no one left on board, on his own authority moved me into a first-class berth whereas I had embarked as a passenger without a cabin. When we exchanged views on current French politics (a cause for embarrassment for me, because I was less well informed about it than was allowable), the tobacconist was quick to wonder what the cunning Ulysses would have done in the situation we were talking about, had he found himself in the place of the head of the French government. One day of stormy weather, when we were chatting on the bridge as we watched the waves’ assault, the captain of the steamer complained of old Neptune, who, that evening, was really “not good for us.” In the everyday world as in that of the statues, myth was always present and I saw, one night when the full moon spread out above some town I can no longer identify, an itinerant telescope renter whose placard informed idlers that he would show them Artemis for a few drachmas. As for me, the myth I was living was that of the traveler, having no more than a very reduced baggage and walking about in clothes that would soon be worn down to the thread, eating frugally and believing, when I drank resinous wine (that nectar that smells of leather and woodwork), that I was consuming all the truth of Greece, a country whose harshness the academics have failed to note, just as they have disregarded what is baroque and composite about it.

  As regards the malady that the vague plural “fevers” tends to situate in a mysterious and indeterminate remoteness, I have always thought (rightly or wrongly) that it was not in Egypt but in Greece that I contracted it. Toward the end of the stay of a little more than two months that I made on the peninsula, a foolish matter led me, in fact, to spend two nights in a place infested with mosquitoes against which the detestable conditions in which I was lodged prevented me from protecting myself. A piece of negligence on the part of my bank, from whom I had requested money for my return, now imminent, caused me to remain stuck in Olympia because I could not pay my hotel bill. Kindly, the proprietor was patient for a few days, but as I was his only guest, in the end he made up his mind to tell me that, really, he could not keep the establishment open for only one guest and one who was not paying. A telegram that I had sent to pester those who were providing me with funds had gone unanswered and my host concluded from this (which was logical) that I should no longer hope to receive the money I was expecting. Sincerely grieved (his contrite attitude showed me this indubitably) to be obliged to ask me to leave, he announced to me that he had rented for me in the nearest town, Pyrgos, a small room where I would be lodged for another three days without having to pay anything; I would leave my suitcase at Olympia, taking away with me only what was strictly necessary. This was done, and I went and installed myself in a wretched place, where the windows did not close properly and where the bed had no mosquito net. I was very warm within the four walls of that room, which one could not ventilate without being invaded by a cloud of insects, and the bites of the innumerable little beasts that found their way in despite everything because of the poor joints made sleep impossible for me. The fatigue due to my peregrinations, often made under a leaden sun, as well as to my alimentary carelessness, the difficulty into which my bank’s silence had put me and the impression of abandonment that resulted from it could only make heavier for me an atmosphere already appreciably pestilential. Planning to hold out as long as possible with the infinitesimal sum that I had in my pocket, I decided to simplify my meals in the extreme: a portion of a coarse bread I bought and a few bu
nches of grapes that I went and filched from the vines thereabouts were enough to sustain me during one or two days. I cheerlessly envisaged the moment when I would have no other resource than to go on foot, in order to ask for my repatriation, to a town situated some sixty kilometers away, the least distant among those where I could find a consulate (as I had learned from the Guide bleu, from which I had not separated). In the most natural way in the world, and without my having to impose on myself the additional fatigue and tiresomeness of such a proceeding, this unpleasant affair came to an end: before undertaking my pedestrian escapade, I decided to make, on the off chance, a complete tour of the banks in Pyrgos to see whether any transfer had been effected there in my name; in one of them, I was told that an order had indeed arrived but that they had not notified me, thinking that my bank in Paris would have taken care of that. I returned triumphantly to Olympia and lunched at the hotel before getting on the train again. Happy for himself as well as for me, the proprietor brought out from his cellar a good bottle of Demestika with which he watered my lunch gratis. I drank the entire bottle by myself, which would have been much too much, had I been in better form. And I thus left Olympia in a state of excitation and euphoria both at once, after having exchanged demonstrations of the greatest cordiality with my host.

  It was to Patras that I was going, in order to embark there for Brindisi, whence the train would take me back to Paris. I had decided to make, before returning to France, a pilgrimage to Missolonghi, where Lord Byron died, in conditions that succeeded in making him into a legendary character: laid low by fever, as he had just put himself at the service of the Greeks to help them free themselves from the yoke of the Turks. I attached to my gesture only the vaguest political meaning for, if I still thought that a true poet is necessarily an enemy of oppression, I had, at the time of my abandonment of everything, taken an eraser to my militant inclinations. Simply, I regarded Lord Byron as one of the most eminent literary figures of the past century, and it was as a romantic that I went to pay homage, wanting to breathe the air in which there had still to be mixed a little of the last sigh of the lame aristocrat who—after so many passions, debauches, and scandals—had gone off to end up far away as a hero of liberty.

  Missolonghi was in truth a sinister straggling village, endowed (to the best of my recollection) with a statue of the lord in the middle of a small square on which there was also a Café Byron (or rather “Mpiron,” according to the Hellenic orthography). The sea wasn’t even the sea, at least in its coastal part, which looked like a swamp covered with a crust of dirt. A bad smell prevailed and it seemed that in fact no stranger, poet or not, would have been capable of enduring such miasmas for long without being weakened by them as though by a poison. It was, I’m quite convinced, when I had returned from Missolonghi to Patras that I felt prey to a discomfort so persistent and so profound that I couldn’t attribute it simply to the effect of fatigue and the heat.

  The alert was given me when I drank a glass of ice water while resting on the terrace of a café: from the first swallow, it seemed to me I was consuming a beverage of a frightful bitterness and I thought it was a matter of the water being unwholesome. A little later, drinking something else, I found it just as bitter and realized that this detestable taste was not inherent in what I was drinking: the most delectable liquid in the world would have revolted me in the same way since it was from me, and not from outside, that this bitterness emanated.

  After the incident that had kept me in Olympia and then in Pyrgos, revealing to me all at once the reality of my remoteness, I confess that this discovery frightened me: I saw myself ill and forcing myself to be admitted to a hospital in Patras, an ugly and depressing town, so dilapidated that in the hotel where I was staying—the best or one of the best—it rained through the ceiling of my room. Without waiting further, I therefore made my reservation on the first steamship that could take me to Italy.

  Now, I had to struggle against an abominable fatigue and it was very late at night that my boat was supposed to weigh anchor. The wisest thing would have been to wait up until the hour appointed for the departure, but I didn’t have the courage to do it. I went to bed, giving the hotel desk instructions to wake me at the proper moment. At about five o’clock in the morning a bellboy came and knocked at my door and, quite abashed, announced to me that the ship had left the port. I was so shattered by this that I do not even know if I had the strength to become angry. The price of my passage lost, I would have to telegraph once again for someone to send me the money necessary for the payment of another passage, this with the same hazards as at the time of my preceding request and, in addition, the risk of being quickly overcome by the illness. But at Patras as at Pyrgos things, in the end, worked themselves out: in the course of the morning the deus ex machina presented itself in the form of a dragoman all trimmed with braid, who had learned through his office what had happened and offered to get me out of my difficulty. In return for a large gratuity, he procured me, without its entailing a new disbursement, a cabin in a boat that was leaving for Brindisi that same evening.

  This time I was at the port well in advance and I embarked in order to go to bed almost immediately, worn out by a day during which I had not succeeded in finding the long interval of peace I had hoped for. One of the servants at the hotel had in effect persecuted me by knocking at my door pretty nearly hour after hour to demand his tip (which I had certainly decided to give him but only when I left, not at all by capitulating to a solicitation that was insolent because of the distrust it indicated), a conflict in which each of us on our own account remained stubborn and in which we were both losers: if it cost me my rest, it cost him the drachmas that he was reckoning on for, exasperated, I finally threw him out and slammed the door in his face with the firm desire to knock him senseless.

  At Bari—where the boat took me without an additional payment, having arrived at Brindisi very late, so that they could not oblige anyone to disembark in the middle of the night—I had to submit to another kind of victimization: toward the end of a walk in the town and in the port, I was suddenly accosted by some customs officers, who took me into their guardhouse, searched me, and despite my protests relieved me of my pocket knife, jeering. But the irritation that this incident caused me was compensated for by the little I saw of Bari (of which I haven’t forgotten the candy-colored houses in one of its poor neighborhoods) and then by the long rail journey I made all the way to Milan, which revealed to me an Italy less desolate than Greece without, for all that, modulating to a postcard sort of charm and offering here and there its displays of clustered grapes suspended from trees or from the intersections of lofty poles.

  The disease took hold of me rinforzando once I was in Milan. Sitting in a café, I heard around me a buzzing of conversations that appeared to me to be held in French and not in Italian as they obviously were: absolutely pointless family stories about which the other customers seemed to be talking to one another and that I had to follow in all their most insignificant details, without anything being spared me, this having the same absurd and obsessive character as those dreams I have occasionally had whose content is reduced to a long text (dictionary or treatise) that I decipher without skipping a line, believing it is given to me by the dream whereas in truth I am inventing it as I go along, a horribly fatiguing and tedious work that seems to me to last the entire night and is perhaps only a caricatural image of the way I have of going back over each sentence before passing on when I read a book, even a prefiguration of the activity that for the past fifteen years or so has been the number one occupation of my life: the written formulation of this immense monologue that in a certain sense is given to me, since all of its material is drawn from what I have experienced, but which in another sense obliges me to make a constant effort of invention, since I must introduce an order into this indefinitely renewed material, shuffle its elements, adjust them, refine them until I succeed in grasping something of their signification.

  At the station resta
urant, where I went to have lunch, I ordered—so as to dope myself as much as out of greediness—a bottle of sparkling red wine that was probably a lambrusco (that wine of a dull red with a somewhat rough taste with which my wife and I regaled ourselves in 1954 in Mantua at the Ristorante Albergo ai Garibaldini, a gastronomical place but simple and homely, whose founders were said to be three Garibaldians, “two fathers and a son,” we were told without further specifics by the waiter who was serving us). Perfectly lucid at the end of the meal, I paid the check and tried to stand up: to my great surprise I found that my legs refused to serve me, and, even though I was not properly speaking drunk, since I was quite rational, I managed to leave the table only at the cost of a considerable effort. I had scarcely reached the street, where the sun beat down hard, when I was overcome by dizziness and had to lean back against a wall for a certain time in order not to collapse, seeing before me—as though I had entered a bizarre state of ecstasy—only a formless, intensely luminous mist. This momentary dissolution of the visible world, accompanied by a sensation of faintness—the whole perceived quite coolly—was the final blow that plunged me into anxiety and I began to recover my equanimity only when I was on the station platform, suitcase within reach and ready to step up into the train after having undergone (without being able, this time, to derive the least metaphysical pleasure from it) the assaults of an intestinal disturbance of which I had had precipitantly to go relieve myself.