The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  That same evening (when my wife and our doctor friend came to pay me a visit and told me that I was actually in the pavilion of the Hôpital Claude-Bernard where they perform “resuscitations”), the absurdity of my entire odyssey appeared to me flagrant. How, drugged to death as I was, could I have run off from my home in the middle of the night and made my way to the Gare de Lyon in order to take the train there (that train, I think now, whose very late hour of departure would have been quite strange)? How, once the alcohol drunk at Cannes had knocked me out finally, could the hospital to which it had been necessary to transport me without losing a second have been a hospital in Brussels? But at the time, what is true of most dreams was true of this odyssey: none of these unlikely notions posed any problem for me, and I adhered totally to this construction, which was entirely emotional and which I had in my mind as a perfectly evident established fact about which I did not even have to reflect, far from it appearing to be the more or less successful result of an effort at reconstruction responding to my need to soothe my uneasiness as to the place in which I found myself.

  A few phrases that fell from the lips of my visitors had reduced to nothing the fable of my incursion into the South, that fable of which I could not say either that I had invented it or even that it had appeared like something revealed when a veil is torn, since, as I regained consciousness, I had found it within me as a past which, as such, existed in the simplest way in the world. Through this contact with family and friends, whose testimony was heavy with all their weight of flesh and bones, the thread had been tied again: Jacqueline beside my bed was no more than a phantasm (or more exactly the result of a false recognition, for I realized that the silhouette thus identified was that of a nurse wearing the classic white uniform); I was no longer prey to any misunderstanding about the setting of the drama or the way in which I had entered this place; the very next day, I would escape from my condition as an almost anonymous patient, since my wife would bring me a pair of my own pajamas, for which I would exchange the odious nightshirt, at once so short and so wide, which they had made me put on like a madman’s blouse. Everything seemed, therefore, to have returned to the order defined by geodesy and the ephemerides, in conjunction with the registry office. All that remained was for me to take advantage of this enforced stay on the neutral terrain of the hospital, as a suspension introduced by an exceptional situation into the conflict that was agitating me, and here allow to ripen—who knows?—the seed of a solution, since I, as a resuscitated man, had paid quite dearly for the right to be in love openly. I was to learn, however, that I was still only at my very first step in the path to the return to reality: my hope of détente proved to be the utopian daydream of a convalescent to whom the future seems rosy after the tunnel he has passed through, for my gesture had no other result than to show not only the extent of my disease but my lack of concern for the harm that my defection might cause someone else; furthermore, the visits made to me—at my own request—by the woman whose irruption in my life had brought my confusion to a head, especially the intimacy manifested by her coming—more revealing still than the looks, the grasping of hands that refused to part—betrayed quite plainly the feeling that tied me to an intruder, with a bond such that I gave her access to whatever place I was and that in any circumstances at all she was the one I desired; as for the very structure of my person (the foundation of any edifice that, whether or not in the manner of a castle in the air, I had to build all over again), many days were necessary for it to finish putting itself together again, so shaken had it been by my long period of unconsciousness and the various drugs with which I was saturated.

  Mentally, the crisis having concluded with a plunge of more than three days into the nothingness of the coma, I had suffered a shock ruder than I imagined. For perhaps twenty-four hours, I was, during my vague moments of somnolence, prey to an idea in itself not so strange but that shows how fragile my sense of my own identity was. As though, all unity having been broken, my fate was definitely to be a person divided, two creatures were substituted, in the most natural way in the world, for my usual personality: I ceased to be Michel Leiris and instead became—against an unclear and rather bookish or iconographic background of chaises longues and lawns—a couple of very snobbish English writers, identifying now with the man and now with the woman, according to whether I rested lying on my left side or my right, not experiencing in any way the painful impression that can be caused by a delirious reverie, that one is too weak to deny but that is nevertheless disturbed by the dissonant and confused perception of the extent to which such a divagation is impossible.

  When this fantasy, now a prisoner of my mind after having controlled it for a while, this fantasy that had taken me over, was reduced to the condition of a memory whose extravagance amused me, two ideas, also singular, occupied a part of each of my nights, one assaulting me during the two hours or so that never took me much farther than midnight, the other joining this one while I oscillated between a too lucid wait for the first pallor of day and a daydream which, even when it slipped into dream, did not cause me to forget either this bed where I was lying or this room enclaved in a pavilion that I knew was itself integrated into a vast group of buildings. The remarkable thing, and perhaps more significant than it seemed at first, was that the keystone of both of these curious constructions was a personage belonging (in the one as well as in the other) to the world of the theater, as though they had come to complete my first illusion and to illustrate, in a way richer in imagery than the latter, which was confined to setting in motion an elegant household of aesthetes, the theme of artistic activity as a way—direct or indirect—of enticing others to look at oneself, even if only a small number of persons. I must now wonder why, scarcely out of danger, I was so obsessed by the idea of the artist as theatrical figure at least to some degree, and if a consideration of that order did not have something to do with the gesture that led me to a sort of temporary death.

  To the first of these constructions, dismantled each day but rebuilt each night more or less without variant, a memory quite distant (since it goes back to the year following the First World War) is probably not unrelated: the weekend I spent, with a girl and two boys who for several months were my inseparable companions, at the Pont-aux-Dames old people’s home, intended (as we know) for the least fortunate of the professionals of the stage and to which our little gang of four had been brought by one of the two boys, whose mother—a former actress—had a management position there. Nothing about this brief stay deserves to be mentioned, except perhaps the indiscretion—in truth quite harmless—to which I found myself led: having to separate from my confederates in order to turn up Monday morning at the office of the delivery department of the Cité Paradis, where I worked (because I had to do something, after all) and sickened by the thought of this departure, which seemed to me to signify that having ceased thus to be one of the party I would occupy in our zealously united quartet a position henceforth marginal, I decided to rid myself of a job that was proving more irksome than ever, and I sent my bosses a telegram in which I pleaded a health problem or some other accident but which, drafted without great concern for verisimilitude, was equivalent to a resignation.

  An old star of the variety theater, now the director of a foundation which, depending on the night when I dreamed this, was sometimes a charity establishment like the Pont-aux-Dames, where I had slept without having had any right to, sometimes a private conservatory—this was the character I incarnated, lying in that bed which seemed to me to be the actual bed of the ancient celebratory of Paris, that actress who, in plays that were once famous, had been so fêted but who was saved from complete oblivion only by the philanthropic or educational foundation to which her name as well as all her inner passion were henceforth attached. Like a ship’s captain who, even while he is dreaming in the darkness of his cabin, knows he is responsible for the vessel with which he has been entrusted, and that he is responsible for other people, I was this solitary idol fro
m whom the little world over which she reigns seems to her to require all her vigilance, even in the hours when between her and this little world there is no longer any precise relationship. An artist of the grand sort; a beauty who without appearing ridiculous can recall the time when she would happily have destroyed her career in response to an impulse of the heart or a nod of the head; God the father or mother (like the captain on his boat or the respected matron of a whole little household)—these were approximately the features of the figure in which, in the first half of each night, I would yet again clothe myself. One of the last times she appeared, when a certain distance had opened up between me and that figure (for if she continued to haunt me, it was now in the third person that her existence inhabited my mind, a distancing first begun on the night when she had fleetingly taken as her official identity that of Mme Daynes-Grassot, whom I saw perform when I was an adolescent and she an old person whom my parents had applauded when she was younger), she bore a name reduced to the surname alone, as happens with the names of many stars: something like “Sandier” or “Sanguier” but whose two syllables, instead of sounding crisply like these, created a whole past full of passionate emotions experienced, at the same time as they were provoked, by this woman whose triumphs, achieved on stages and within a repertory that were not those of our official theaters, remained, for certain people, legendary. With this surname, as loquacious as a thick calendar of events, the identity of my visitor was, that night, once and for all affirmed.

  An actress whose name, worshiped not so long ago, could scarcely have any meaning now except for those rare survivors of her generation or for the young actors who were her students, this creature who during so many nights was attached to me so closely that she became confused with my own person did not have (I believe) any particular prototype. As I thought it over, of course, I found two names that were probably models for hers: that of the political leader Marc Sangnier, whose Christian socialism my brother and I, as adolescents, approved of and whose name we wrongly or rightly pronounced “Sanguier”; and that of the actress Aimée Tessandier, star from the same period, a photograph of whom came into my hands afterward, showing her with a mouth at once pinched and fleshy, somber bohemian eyes, and dark hair tumbling down over her shoulders. But this (I sense) is an entirely formal filiation, corresponding to the mechanical use of two names—one taken as it is, the other with its first syllable amputated—in order to baptize a figure who, in truth, sums up in a motley sort of way the special qualities of those women of the theater of whom I had heard people speak when I was a child or whose portraits I had seen in the series Célébrités contemporaines published by Félix Potin, a numerous succession of photo-premiums inserted into grocery bags and depicting sometimes a leader in the world of the sciences, literature, or the arts, sometimes a politician or a member of a ruling family, sometimes an explorer or athlete, sometimes a big shot in the clergy, the army, or the navy, or someone else who had won renown in any one of the other fields—crime excepted—where one can make a name for oneself. Unlike this uncertain figure, a symbol whose form was muddled but lively and warm with the shadows and lights of the life of the theater, it was a personage duly situated with respect to me and clearly labeled in the album of my family memories—a cousin on my mother’s side of whom for years now I have no longer had any direct news—who was the colorless and unradiant protagonist of the second of my nocturnal obsessions.

  “Louis de Kipouls,” “de Kipours,” “de Kilpou” . . . this was approximately (formless the first nights, then fairly clear, even though probably lacking, here, one or two other syllables that gave it the odd appearance of a name of a remote principality somewhere near the Indies) the pseudonym with which my cousin, whose actual first name was Louis, embellished himself in my dream, in order to try to mount, in little halls in the sixteenth arrondissement, the plays that he wrote as an amateur, or, failing something better, to contrive to place his essays of dramatic criticism in the daily papers. In this cousin, an affable man of slight build who, until the age of retirement, was director of a patent office and devoted all his leisure time to the practice of equitation, I never knew the slightest ambition to be dramatist or columnist. But when his image came thus in pursuit of me, I could attribute to him connections to the world of the theater without this being a pure fantasy: the father of this enthusiast for advanced dressage whom we always childishly called “Loulou,” even when he had gray hair, had taken as his second wife the Belgian singer Claire Friché, whose sumptuous voice and perfect simplicity of heart, along with her impressive physique, that of a popular heroine in whom Flanders and Spain would happily have united, enchanted a part of my childhood; though I don’t dare affirm it, for this is inscribed for me in a much hazier remoteness, which is less a past than a random collection of oral traditions unequally retained, I believe, in fact, that my cousin’s mother was an actress, in her case retiring early and remaining in complete obscurity while my aunt Claire had her hour of fame in Brussels and in Paris, as a soprano specializing mostly in verist works.

  The whole time that I submitted to the intrusion, reiterated each night, of what was not even a semblance of a character whose features I could have perceived or divined, but a dry scenario made still more irritating by its total insignificance and its vacuity, like something that comes to you by way of a piece of gossip or an inattentive reading of the newspapers, I did not know why the memory of this cousin—with whom I have always had good relations but whom I have lost sight of for a long time now—came back to me with the same insistence as if I had been one of those whom, in his tireless attempts to be performed or printed, this imaginary nuisance had had to solicit all day long. Centered upon an individual with a pseudonym at first indistinct (the given name “Louis” flanked by a name with a particle) but soon clear enough to seem, through the action of a mysterious correlation, to define its bearer as a person at once minuscule and ridiculously sophisticated whom I might have seen, for example, by looking through the large end of an opera glass, this construction—as it became more precise and solidified into a figure with unalterable relief—tended to situate itself at a distance and to persecute me, not in the manner of a fixed idea, but as might have done some sort of strange thing set permanently by my bedside. Having achieved its final form, the construction relating to my cousin, even though lacking any visual aspect (or even a sonorous one) that would more or less have connected it to the tangible world, appeared to me localized in the right part of my room. What I knew, in fact, of the machinations of the failure to whom I was connected by the impalpable thread of kinship, took place, with as much obviousness as if the thing were a physical construction, in the portion of space that extended to my right from the edge of my bed to the side wall of the room, a portion occupied only by a washbasin and a limited number of pieces of furniture or other objects including a bed with no occupant, whereas the left portion (beyond a nonworking television set positioned opposite the door) was dominated by a patient who could not speak and hardly moved—someone who, stricken some weeks earlier by a malady whose nature no one understood, was sunk in a coma and lay next to me living a larval sort of existence that was sustained through the most varied artifices, including, as part of the program, a session of physical exercises to which, from time to time, a graceful physical therapist in a small white beret submitted the inert body. It was, in other words, as though I had chosen the part of the room that was not haunted by this living dead man, in order to lodge there what had neither the need nor any conceivable possibility of being lodged anywhere: not even cobweblike, this construction, more abstract than a blueprint, in which entered only the idea of my cousin, in the absence of any image that would have allowed me to see him as I knew him (with his pleasing smile, his delicate mustache, his pince-nez, and his unfailingly well-groomed manner of dressing) or as he became, apparently (an old man, reclusive and almost blind, who telephones one of our mutual relations every day for no other reason than to escape thus for
a few minutes his isolation as a widower without children).

  In a parish bulletin or some other rag of his Vaugirard neighborhood, and occasionally in a thin booklet, the paternal uncle of my cousin Loulou—a cripple afflicted with a clubfoot and often referred to as “Louis the lame” in order not to confuse him with his homonym—published, signing them “Louis de Lutèce,” columns through which, in the Bottin mondain (where he felt it flattering to appear), he could promote to the rank of “art critic,” and decorate with a name which in Chat-Noir manner smacked of the big-city scholar, the humble Parisian pen pusher with artistic and somewhat bohemian tastes which he was. From “Lutèce” to “Kipouls . . .” the path is obviously the very same one that leads from the fantastical descendant of Gallo-Roman nobility to a Parisianized Hindu like the very select maharajah of Kapurtala, from the self-righteous follicles of the fifteenth arrondissement to the real or fictitious little theaters of the sixteenth, and—obliquely connecting two generations—from the amiable would-be dauber whose Cour des Miracles leg and druidical beard seemed to be his canting arms, to his nephew the horseman as I disguised him in this dream which unfolded in a place whose cadavers, awaiting reanimation, whose modern iron lungs and other apparatuses of survival equipped it as though to make of it, far beyond the vaudeville to which the abundant bed linen would have lent it, the setting for a science fiction intrigue. To the deferred cadaver that I, too, had been, they had applied many of those perfected methods. In the quasi-infantile state in which I found myself, after that type of death, followed by a rebirth, was it very surprising that I should be assailed by distant memories of childhood? Yet it is odd that it should have been those in particular that came back to me, rather than others by which I know I was more marked, and that they should have, in order to knock at the door of my mind, taken the form of that inept story in which a vain ambition for the theater was the only incentive.