The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  On the Right Bank, I had displayed a momentary inclination toward an adolescent licentiousness. On the Left Bank, when I was farther down the road of drunkenness, I sank into the suspect waters of sentimentality. Among those people who seemed to have no other concern than to chat peacefully in this apartment, rather gloomy despite the lights, there was one couple with whom I maintain relations not just familiar but almost familial. When they were married, I was best man to the groom (the musician in the small circle of my friends from work), and a twofold feeling of affection and admiration is what I have for his wife, an American whose kindness and simplicity are rare adjuvants of her beauty, already great. Lost as I was, it was to her that I clung when I was tired of talking with others and disposed to give precedence to exchanges of the heart over exchanges of ideas, with which I am not so enamored and from which the mists that the scotch whiskey had amassed in my head contributed to deflecting me. I have a great sorrow, I said to her, without being more specific, speaking like a little boy who is trying to get someone to comfort him. Then, with a tender and childish avidity, I huddled up close to her—she could do nothing—and I remained by her side for a long time, sitting on a narrow bit of couch or on the edge of an armchair. (As I was convalescing, having found out that during the entire latter part of the evening I had persisted in staying so close that she was inconvenienced by it, I apologized for having importuned her in that way, but she laughed and immediately reassured me with a few friendly remarks.)

  About the improvised supper that my wife and I had afterward at the house, settling in the kitchen with two or three of our close friends who had left at the same time we did, I recall almost nothing, and would even be incapable of saying whether the musician was present along with that American with the pale triangular face whom I had clutched as someone who is drowning may clutch a buoy or a child its mother’s dress. I can glimpse only the form of my friend Limbour (whose silhouette has always seemed to me that of a pirate climbing up the rigging), and I know that during the meal I drank a little more wine.

  Our guests left us close to midnight, and this was, for my wife and me, the moment to go to bed. Either I sobered up a little as I undressed and prepared for bed; or, tormented as I was under my outward appearance of childishness or frivolity, I perceived with alternate subsidences and recrudescences of acuity what had continued to unfold deep inside me while I was distraught in my outward behavior. Whatever the case, I recall fairly clearly the rush of appalling reflections that had just invaded me all at once when, standing in front of the bureau where my linen is kept, I opened with a sudden angry gesture (the way one picks up an object in order to break it or throw it out the window) the drawer in which were deposited—among woolens, gloves, and other clothing accessories—my bottles of barbiturates.

  During those past few days, it was decidedly an odd game that I had been playing—something that I will compare now to a bizarre contest of blind man’s buff. What was I, then, if not (but I don’t claim to have really thought, at that moment, of the Mozart character I will allude to in order to be better understood, keeping in mind, also, that at the very most I can only interpret what I felt much more than thought) if not a Cherubino almost sixty years old who is maddened by the sight of each desirable woman, but who, unlike Cherubino, is down to his last reserves and not waging his first campaign? I had betrayed everyone, and, attaching myself to people whom I reduced practically to the level of shadows, each of which faded away to make room for another, which would vanish in its turn, I had acted as though no one existed, and I had annihilated everything by thus denying the presences without whom nothing is left in front of one but emptiness. For me, who had for so long fondled the idea of my own elimination, it was now or never. If I waited, I would do it too late, or I would never do it, and I would only succeed, at the rate I was going, in purely and simply disgusting those who had loved me until then.

  Carrying with me my provision of poison, I went into the bathroom, as I do every night before going to bed. Shut in there, and careful not to lose anything, I emptied into the hollows of my hands the contents of the six bottles and then, with a rapid motion, I crammed all the small tablets into my mouth. Their bitter taste did not seem too unpleasant when I chewed them. I knew, anyway, what this taste was, because at the time when I was still making a medicinal use of the tablets I had sometimes happened to suck, instead of swallowing, the little mauve-colored pill incised with a median line permitting one if necessary to break it in two. But I had never before tasted them in such considerable quantity, and this time, I felt a whole mass of vaguely sweet and purple-blue bitterness in my mouth, with an emotion not completely lacking in joy. Having swallowed down the whole thing and pulled the flush chain several times (without managing to make all the bottles I had thrown into the toilet bowl disappear), I returned to my wife, went to bed, and curled up against her.

  If I had contemplated making use of a fatal dose of sleeping medicine or other voluptuous poison in case things went decidedly too badly, this had remained in some sense theoretical; and even when I was hoarding in order to form my provision, the first step toward putting it into practice, it was rather in order to reassure myself—by means of that last card that I would hold in my hand—and not with the deliberate intention of suicide. When I felt that the moment had come to take the decisive step, if—in that instant—there was truly on my part a will to destroy, it scarcely lasted the time of a lightning flash. Rather than kill myself, what I wanted to do by eating the poison was to take a great plunge, something that later—when, having been rescued and having resolved not to begin again, I had put on the agenda a large effort at correction—made me think of what had represented for me, in that dream whose exegesis I must not abandon for in order to find my feet again I need more than ever to clarify things, the plunge of the dog Dine rushing headlong to the bottom of a cliff before launching herself in pursuit of a bird: to perform the gesture of a daredevil, who hurtles forward, head down, in defiance of what will happen and gambles his life on the toss of a coin. Rather than annihilation, what I was seeking in consuming the poison (as though I had needed to crown my series of foolish acts with a last foolishness enormous enough to silence all criticisms) was to sink down into the depths of gluttony: pushing to a tragic extreme my pitiful behavior as vaudeville boozer, I wanted to stuff myself to the point of dying of it with a substance more harmful still than alcohol and in which (if one can put it this way) one is dissolved, in a well-being that is at the same time a nonbeing, within precincts that belong to the domain of death but are not exactly death, in the place (perhaps) where stands the majestic escarpment whose appearance I have noted in many of my dreams.

  My deed done, then, I returned to my bedroom and lay down next to my wife, in the state of mind of a child that has just gorged itself clandestinely on sweets and would like her forgiveness without having to ask for it.

  I have sufficiently insisted on the cowardice that is, in me, an almost congenital defect, to say without pointless reservation that in that minute I was not afraid. Moreover, if I was not unaware that I had played for high stakes and that my sort of bad farce had a chance of having extreme consequences, I did not in the least believe that my fate was sealed. It was, as I have said, a heads-or-tails toss rather than a gesture in response to the deliberate decision to put an end to it all.

  Lying close to my wife, it appeared to me impossible to keep this to myself. Wasn’t one of the hardest aspects of my situation of these past weeks precisely the fact that it was in her that I would have wanted to confide and that she was the last one to whom it would have been possible to me to expose my torment for, by speaking, I would have violated—and profaned—the secret that tied me to another woman? Having suffered daily from not being able to impart all my confidences to her (to her who knows me better than anyone else) I imparted to her at least this one: a few words from my mouth half asleep informed her that I was holding a provision of phenobarbital and that I had eaten it.
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  I had scarcely spoken before my wife declared that she was going to telephone our doctor friend. But I asserted to her that it was useless to disturb him at such an hour (wishing perhaps, in truth, that he would come but not wanting to seem to waver). I was going to go to sleep peacefully now and, I added, as to what would come next, I’ll be free of it if they pump my stomach a few times. Saying this, I was thinking of what my correspondent, the medical student, during the conversation that we had had on one of the preceding days, had taught me about suicides using products such as soneryl or gardenal and about the care that allows, even long hours after the ingestion of the poison, one to save those who have taken this bad step. I had confessed, my gesture had left the realm of the irrevocable and everything seemed likely—now that I had given way—to collapse into a lugubrious comedy.

  I sang the praises (it appears) of the two American women whom I had seen during the day, my hostess of the Right Bank and my comforter of the Left Bank, qualifying them as “very good women.” If I evoked their twofold image in preference to any other, it was (I suppose) because they were, in the circumstances, the only ones of whom it was possible for me to speak without remorse, among the figures of the constellation in which shone the one that (much later) I would associate with the Evening Star pricked out in a tender sky and inflamed like the skies of autumn that I loved so much when I was in Peking.

  All that is literature . . . I asserted finally, meaning not only that literature had hurt me to the core and that I was no more than that, but that nothing could henceforth happen to me that would weigh more heavily than what was accomplished by ink and paper in a world without one at least of the three prescribed dimensions.

  It was after that (according to the story told by my witness) that I plunged resolutely into darkness.

  II

  Maccheroni . . . was the suggestion (articulated as best he could and in his softest tone) of the white-jacketed maître d’hôtel who had been vainly trying, for a long time already, to find even one word they might have in common in whatever language possibly among those they might know—he, maître d’hôtel at the Hôtel de la Ville, via Sistina, Roma, and the two ladies, apparently Japanese though dressed in Western fashion, whose dinner it was incumbent upon him to order, a procedure with negative results given that they seemed not to know Italian, English, or any of the other languages attempts at which had been made, not only by him—notepad in hand, eye attentive, and torso slightly inclined—but by one or two acolytes summoned to the rescue in order to try languages that he himself did not know. Maccheroni . . . suggested the maître d’hôtel, his plump face suddenly beaming, as though illuminated by this inspiration that had come to him: maccheroni, the name of a dish known all over the world, is part of the international vocabulary and, on this point at least, the icy glaze of incomprehension will at last be broken. But the two ladies continued to smile with lowered eyes, and the beam on the face of the maître d’hôtel yielded to a desolate stupor: “maccheroni” is no more a magic word than macaroni a magic dish, and, since in this case it has not been the open-sesame which would unlock the door of communication between Europe and Asia, there is no point in trying any further.

  It was not to the word “maccheroni”—widespread, though not universal—that I clung, as to the mysterious vocable that a spiritual being charged with guiding me through the underworld taught me with a whisper in my ear in order to resurrect me, when I escaped from that thing which, at the time, far from being positively a thing, was not even a subject of discussion, but which, now, I can represent to myself as an immersion for three and a half days in absolute darkness. If I got caught on something somewhere in the instant when I came back up from my plunge—and in fact I would probably stick closer to the truth in saying: if something coming from somewhere caught hold of me and caused me to emerge for an instant—it was the culinary idea of macaroni (and not the word considered as such) that, for a second, played this role by involving itself in the darkness that my mind had become. A sudden feeling of disgust—a feeling that did not, strictly, follow anything, or, at least, anything definable—seized me at the moment when I thought that in order to feed me they were trying to make me ingurgitate a long tube of macaroni, by passing it through one of my nostrils: this reminded me of the ignoble sensation one experiences sometimes when one vomits and does so with such abandon that a part of the vomit goes into the nasal fossae. In order to be capable of imagining that strange hands were being thus employed in feeding me, there must have accumulated behind me a number of confused perceptions on the basis of which I could already form a very vague sense of my situation. But this disgust, and my immediate revolt against this repugnant mode of ingestion, represent probably my first gleam of true consciousness as I emerged from the sort of death in which I had been: as I was convalescing, I reported this detail to my doctor friend, believing I was reporting to him a pure phantasm; yet he said to me, laughing, that the macaroni in the nostril was not in the least my invention, since during my period of unconsciousness they had fed me by means of a nasal tube; what ought I to conclude from this, if not that that disgusting sensation of a foreign body being pushed through my nose coincided with the end of my eclipse and that it is therefore (logically) the oldest in the inextricable confusion of impressions I have retained from my period of return to life?

  To return to oneself on a bed transformed by the two boards edging it into a sort of oblong, coverless box, to find oneself with feet and hands squeezed within loops formed by a sort of sausage of padded cloth, and to feel, thus tightly bound, like a maniac who has been put into a straitjacket, whereas one knows that the excess that has brought one here was not a violent delirium but the most tender passion: this is what—unlike the torture of the tube of macaroni in the nostril—gives rise to a certain romantic outburst. In that Brussels hospital where nameless people were caring for me, I was something like a Peter Ibbetson separated by his prisoner’s irons from the Duchess of Towers, a lover in an opera captive to the rival faction and singing his lament, a poor Tom on whom the gates of Bedlam have closed, or any other recluse whose pain, anchored in the depths of a supremely sensitive heart, would make the very stones weep.

  I recalled clearly the moment in which I had ingested the contents of the bottles of barbiturates, but I was much vaguer as to what had happened next. I simply knew that, my deed having been done, I had jumped onto a train just departing for Cannes, wanting to go see Picasso and his friend Jacqueline as much to say goodbye to them as to open my heart and confess to an act most contrary, of any I could have committed, to the example Picasso continually gives, since to scuttle my ship was to deprive myself radically of many years that I would still have had complete latitude to use for creative work. In the company of Picasso and this woman Jacqueline, with whom I sometimes talk about the regions of Sudan where she has lived (which creates between us a sort of freemasonry bond), I had gone to the home of a friend of hers, a very nice doctor, who was a pilot during the period when aviation was something of a cottage industry, and whom I have met two or three times. There, I had drunk a great deal and, my drunkenness combining with the effect of the poison, my flight from home took such a bad turn that they had to rush me to that Brussels hospital. To have gotten drunk at the home of this doctor, in the presence of Picasso, who I know has little liking for the ramblings of a drunk, seemed to me an idiotic conclusion to my lightning-fast trip, and I was especially ashamed of this lapse because it was hardly in keeping with the almost filial spirit in which, even though severely affected by the drug, I had left the quai des Grands Augustins in order to make a leap all the way to the large villa with its ornamental moldings in the Mediterranean South.

  What I can retrace, using only my own memory, of the day on which I returned to myself and of that which followed is decidedly quite confused. Not only have I no precise memory of the moment in which they removed from me the fastenings that had been imposed on me, they told me, because I was trying to get up, b
ut I do not know how I discovered that I had beneath my Adam’s apple an opening which scarred over only after quite a long wait on my part: perhaps I noted that some of the air that I exhaled was escaping noisily through this wound and that I could talk only at the cost of great effort, in broken phrases, in a hoarse voice, and with frequent pauses to catch my breath; or when, after having dressed me in a nightshirt of coarse white cloth (scarcely longer than a pajama top and which I disliked very much), a nurse had me eat like a child, bringing close to my mouth a plate filled with a sort of gruel of which she stoked me with spoonfuls, the person thus cramming me with an authority at once maternal and surly asking me if I could swallow without it hurting; or, again, changing the dressing I had on my throat, she made some reflection on the state of my wound. At that moment, I realized fully that I was in bad shape, but I knew nothing about the complicated work that had been done to bring me back up to the surface, nor about the fact that my saviors had been obliged to resort to tracheotomy—a procedure nowadays quite commonplace—in order to facilitate my respiration. I had only the obscure certainty of being a sort of Lazarus risen from the grave and—neither pleased nor furious at having survived, merely bloated with a violent gust of love and melancholy—I derived a certain pride from having hurled myself recklessly into adventures that had made me exceptional. I had gone to an extreme. I was wrapt in gloom, the widower, the unconsoled who treats death and madness as his equals. However, lying on a sickbed within the four walls of an unfamiliar room, and though certainly cared for humanely, reduced practically to the condition of a prisoner, I was no less oppressed than intoxicated by this quite special misfortune on which I prided myself. Thus (probably toward the end of the first morning) my joy was very great when I recognized, as a white and brown silhouette whose presence I had not detected right away, Jacqueline standing at my bedside and observing me with an affectionate vigilance.