The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  As I viewed it, the room in which I was lying was of an implacable objectivity, which, toward the back, was heavily imposed by the projection of the chest of drawers and, at the top, was affirmed in a more abstract way in the shadows and lights of the moldings that, considered as a whole, appeared to portray a map of a universe extremely simplified and reduced. But crudely as these elements of furniture or ornament made me feel their presence, both were complicated with significations more or less distant, as though at the same time that they were self-contained realities, they were also aides-mémoire placed there to orient my reverie. With all its threatening cubic capacity, the chest of drawers oppressed me, and its volume was the spatial expression of the great gust of passion and despair with which my lungs had filled the last time I had contemplated it. The moldings of the ceiling, and especially what I could see, in their frozen exuberance, of the elaborate figures (mute tempests moving at zero speed) that masked the trihedral angles formed at the four corners of the room by the meeting of the ceiling with the walls—those Napoleon III stuccos of a type probably present in the rue de Rome at the home of the organizer of the illustrious Tuesdays: it was toward the poetry of Mallarmé that they guided me and toward that Book which, beginning in the hospital, had been a great help to me by opening prospects of work through its example. All the sumptuousness of eroticism was also condensed there: those bedroom marvels created by the commerce in love, and of which mirrors, consoles, sconces, credenzas, and other ingredients of Mallarméan sonnets are, for me, the purest expression. The terrible fixity of death, too, was proclaimed by the petrified rhetoric of those fiorituras older than we (since they date from our grandparents’ time) and at the same time younger (since they will survive us and will perhaps witness our biological collapse).

  Whereas vast surfaces (a plain extending to infinity, or a broad, high wall rising vertically) captivated my gaze in those open-air dreams in which an abrupt cliff was the shared feature, what now became embedded in my eyes and forced me into a sort of waking dream was the well-delimited rectangle of a ceiling in a room, closely confined, of a bourgeois apartment. With the geometrical severity of its design and the cruel precision of its reliefs, the ellipse appeared to me not as the persistent sign of a truth that a little ingenuity and patience would have allowed me to discover, but as a presence so extraordinarily pronounced that its intensity seemed out of proportion as much with the testimony of my eyes as with that which my hands would have been able to furnish me if those tiny plaster swellings had been within their reach. More than real, to the very extent that it partook of the nature of a hallucination, I experienced this presence simply as presence with dizzying intensity, and, as I endured it, curious things they had described to me at the hospital came back to my memory: the sort of shift or disorientation in their visual perceptions experienced by tetanus sufferers who have been treated with curare and who (like that woman, a convalescent, both angular and bizarrely graceful, whom I encountered sometimes during my strolls in the hallways) remain for a certain time automatons of a sort, with irregular motions, or demons whose infernal masters have shifted their symmetry, without this necessarily making them ugly, since—I had noted it with my own eyes—a charm a trifle simian may cling to their skewed appearance.

  The person who, saying to me in substance: You think you’re looking over here and what you see is over there, had told me about this trouble, of which I was immediately reminded by the disturbing acuity of the ellipse, was a sort of twenty-three-year-old miracle case, slender, pale under her makeup, with brown hair, whose name was Monique. Rather pretty and touching in her illness, this little saint, little fairy, and more certainly little queen in the guise of a dressmaker’s assistant or a shorthand typist (which she was) was regarded as a star at the Pavillon Lassen: having recovered after being at death’s door, thanks to the treatment using curare, she had been exhibited to a delegation of Soviet doctors, and it had amused her very much, she said, to find herself facing this group of men who were looking upon her as a phenomenon. One of my nurses had often talked to me about her, and, without knowing her, I had had the opportunity of a friendly gesture toward her. The friend who drove me back home—a great connoisseur on the subject of modern art, and, in addition, a discriminating gastronome—had sent me a basket of fruits so magnificent that it would have been indecent to eat it by myself. I therefore tasted some of them, I offered some to my nurses, and, since there still remained a great many, I sent this woman Monique, so popular, a small basket of strawberries that seemed perfectly prepared to be separated from the large basket. Unable to move, but wanting to thank me otherwise than through an intermediary, the recipient sent me word that she would be happy to have a visit, which—of course!—I hastened to pay her. It was thus that we had a rather long conversation, she half lying down and coquettishly dressed in lounging pajamas, I seated and draped in the Scottish plaid bathrobe that was at the time my formal outfit as well as that of every day. The grace of the girl, the sort of aureole with which she was embellished, her position as lady of the court receiving visitors in her alcove or Violetta dying in the last act of La Traviata, made a great impression on me. To the figure of the pretty physical therapist was thus added that of another pleasant person, as though their refreshing apparitions had been planned so that, despite its macabre outfitting and the disgust that seized me at the end, the Hôpital Claude-Bernard was inscribed in my memory in colors more pink than black. Like all sufferers from tetanus restored to health by curare, young Monique had to learn to walk again, and, the morning on which, without support, she risked a few steps surrounded by nurses and physical therapists ready to prevent any possible fall, I was eager to be there to congratulate her and at the same time to say goodbye, for my leaving was by then imminent. It seems to me now that this ill woman, so coddled, will perhaps thus have experienced, despite all the anguish she recounted to me, the finest period of her life: the one that will leave her with the memory of a time when she was the object of the same attentions and almost of the same homages as a prima donna.

  Having returned home very much thinner, my nerves fragile and my sleep disordered, I was of course obliged to rest, but this did not imply a total seclusion. I was supposed to become reaccustomed to things, not to sink into an immobility in every respect harmful, and I was advised to go out a little each day, even before my wound was completely closed. I was amenable, naturally, to this prescription, and, if anything, all too amenable, because this way I could go see my friend, for I had not renounced my love for her. Strengthened by the right that I believed I had won by my severe penitence, I profited candidly from our meetings, and, romantically, I derived an increase of felicity from the very efforts that I had to expend each time in order to separate myself from my fatigue. Those hours, which correspond to the period in which my condition as convalescent had been transformed into pure freedom, number—I believe this firmly—among the best that we spent together.

  The penitence, after all, was still far from over. Almost as soon as I returned, I was subjected to a police interrogation. Summoned to my neighborhood police station (from which they had pursued me after a first communication that my wife had received and that I had ignored), I had to give an explanation for my “suicide attempt,” reported by the administration at the Hôpital Claude-Bernard. At the time of my transfer, my wife, shrinking from revealing the sad truth, had spoken of an accident and the deputy inspector saw a contradiction here that called for a clarification. I assured him that there had in fact been a “suicide attempt” but an almost accidental one, seeing as, without the effect of alcohol, I would not have attempted anything. The deputy inspector wanted to know the reason for it and was annoyed when I told him that, simply depressed, I had acted without a precise motive (which, in the journalistic style of our dialogue, meant that one had to eliminate any idea of marital disagreement, a troubled intimate relationship, or financial distress). To allege depression alone was to lie; but—even if I had had the time an
d the patience to lay the thing out from A to Z and show it in all its complexity—was I going to make my general confession to this policeman? My interlocutor refused to understand that one can commit suicide without a reason. Exasperated, I asked him if he knew what “neurasthenia” was. In uttering this word, which falsified everything still more than before, since it turned me into a purely medical case, I had been quite inspired: the possibility thus provided to the investigator of putting the condemned act away in a compartment he was familiar with appeased him immediately and at the same time brought the interview to an end. Did I have children? That was the question which he asked me next and which was not followed by any other when I had answered it in the negative.

  My statement was read back to me, as written down and typed up by a secretary. What I had said, already rather remote from reality, was not even exactly reproduced in it. As though I had wanted to play the hypocrite, they had noted in it, for example, that “libations” were “inhabitual” to me and that my attitude would have been “altogether different” without the excess of drink in which I had indulged. In fact, I had declared that I was not properly speaking a drunk, even though I occasionally overdid it, and I had added that that night, my depression alone would not have been enough to lead me to swallow the poison. I did not care at all about this piece of paper destined to be lost in some vague file, and I therefore signed it without demanding any changes. The secretary, a hail-fellow-well-met type, reminded me of the outdoors and the practice of sports, thus joining others like him, in my mind, my counselor at the Pavillon Lassen and another doctor who had taken care of me a few years before. I have since then undergone two police interrogations and one by an examining magistrate, at the time of the affair of the Declaration on the right of insubordination in the Algerian War, which the press immediately dubbed “The Manifesto of the 121,” as though the exact number of the first signatories were something that would attract one’s attention. How difficult the truth is to determine, even if one goes at it with the best will in the world—this was what those conversations of a rather particular sort managed to convince me.

  During the period of happy freedom of which I have spoken, my happiness (if it really was that) had depended on those outings won by sheer force over fatigue and other discomforts with which I was afflicted to the point of feeling crippled: an impression of frost and numbness in the tip of my tongue (because they had, it appears, kept this organ squeezed between the arms of a forceps before the tracheotomy allowed me to breathe more easily); an inflammation of the gums that made me think for a while that I had a toothache and suggested to me that, decidedly, my whole mouth had deteriorated; an infirmity, lastly, that proved more tenacious, the difficulties I experienced in using my lungs, especially when I was lying down, and, also, in clearing my throat of its mucosities (having to draw my breath slowly, deeply and noisily, having persistently to clear my trachea in long fits of coughing without succeeding in completely freeing it). For a long time it also seemed to me that my voice was not the same anymore: older, and as though the emission of each sound cost me an effort; flatter, and so demusicalized as to be incapable of moving (even for a few seconds) from simple speech to song or declamation. In truth, this was scarcely a deprivation, since I had never tried my skills at singing, except in fun, and today, as formerly, my way of life very rarely involves my using a sustained diction to recite or read something. But for a year, more or less, I felt injured and in some sense mutilated by this alteration, which I saw—wrongly or rightly—as a humiliating aftereffect of my operation. To be stricken in my voice was to be wounded in the deepest way, assaulted in what is the living vehicle of language—of that language which always appears to me to represent in fact the sacred portion given to the bipeds that we are, no doubt because it is the instrument of communication—and thus of communion—par excellence.

  The dressing that bulged out under my Adam’s apple, reduced though it was, and the fear of chafing that might affect the state of my wound led me, at least in the first days, to go out without buttoning the collar of my shirt. Much as that fear constrained me, I concealed the wads of gauze and the adhesive tapes that I would have been embarrassed to exhibit in the street with an ample linen handkerchief, more comfortable than a silk scarf because it could be knotted smaller and it stayed tight better. For my first outing, I recall taking one of a solid pink, which not only was the right size and had in its favor its absence of gaudiness but went perfectly with the suit of thin grayish cloth that I had decided was the most appropriate for the heat of that day (a garment of very inexpensive manufacture which in the course of my last, or last but one, summer vacation I had bought in Venice, in a shop in the Marzarie quarter, the “Wiener Mode”). A little too big for me, this casual outfit could be worn without a tie more easily than another and, under the circumstances, was therefore as appropriate to my horror of slovenliness as it was to the temperature. A manner of dressing that was enjoined on me, without a doubt, by a concern for my comfort and for a minimum of correctness but which (I have to admit) corresponded only too well to a certain dramatic layout of the situation: the man saved from drowning, still marked by the claw of death, who throws whatever is at hand on his back to run, panting, to his amorous colloquy.

  With this cheap suit, so vaguely my size that one might have thought it was a borrowed outfit (too long and oddly narrow, at the same time too ample in places), with this handkerchief whose pink—especially provocative since it contrasted with my gaunt face—had slightly the air of the pederast or bum, my toilette may have been more or less improvised, but the fact is that it flattered my coquettishness more than any premeditated arrangement. As though by chance, it gave me, in fact, an appearance conforming to the spirit of that type of character I had long been attracted to: the person who, without being a bohemian any more than an outcast, remains in the margins because he is not closely tied to things and—like Hamlet, always at the junction of the ordinary world and another—resides in the equivocal area where the fantastic comes into being; in accordance with a completely modern alchemy, someone who, saturated day and night with an exquisite and consuming drug (poetry, love, eroticism, alcohol, any one of them), exalts his irregular life to the point of endowing it, beyond its high points and low points, with a supreme though (obviously) derisory splendor.

  Below or above the world rather than at the actual level of it, and straining to an extreme to overcome my weakness, I was in the skin of the role without having to compose my character. If there was playacting going on in this, I did it innocently, carried along by complicitous circumstances: an outfit that was almost fortuitous, complementing the effects of my physical state. Nevertheless, with its romanticism, this momentary complaisance seems to me now to have been in the same vein (despite the half-century that had elapsed, and my efforts toward rigor) as a real playacting I once indulged in, well before the age at which one likes to see all things—beginning with oneself—in expressly romantic colors. That day, it was with the help of a sip of wine (perhaps champagne) and, I believe, a red Mephistopheles cap—a paper carnival novelty I had on my head—that I endeavored to incarnate a character who, obscurely, appeared to me that of a débauché. It is probably the diabolical note introduced by the cap that induces me to connect this image, through the intermediary of memories that I wish were more certain, to the figure of the woman who created the role of Satan in Les Quatre Cents Coups: I wonder, in fact, whether it was not at that Christmas fête—or some other children’s afternoon party given at 8 rue Michel-Ange by my parents—that I met the three granddaughters of the star and if the oldest (a redhead?) was not disguised as a gypsy. But it is quite possible that, having said this, I am bringing together scattered elements and merging them into a single masked ball, a brilliant theater scene of which the child in the red headdress—heralding the man in the pink scarf—was the protagonist.

  Neither the inconveniences that I have enumerated nor my disordered sleep seriously detracted from my eup
horia of the first days, troubled only (at the hour of low tide) by the certainty of its short duration: that forced idleness, a relaxed enough situation so that I could enjoy my freedom without alibis, and that immunity which I had apparently won but which could not possibly continue once I had returned completely to this side of the world, were the temporary conditions of a very precarious happiness! Why did I not grasp the fact that after the unfurling of the wave, the situation, for one moment turned upside down, would prove to be the same as it had been when I had tried to do away with myself? I could even assume that it would be still worse, soon, when my friend left Paris, as she did each year when summer came. Either I would suffer bitterly from her absence; or our adventure would fade into unreality, and I would have nothing left between my fingers but emptiness. If we remained together, though physically separated, I would have to make plans, invoke some completely transparent excuses to go join her, which would earn me, from a companion opposed to all falsehood and cruelly affected by what I had done, an intolerable condemnation, if indeed our new conflict remained latent. Of course, I was sensitive to the seductiveness of my friend; not for a second was I bored with her, and I was moved to feel her so feminine from head to toe. But however great her power of enchantment seemed, the idea of an exclusive devotion hardly entered my mind, and I questioned myself constantly about the authenticity of this love: perhaps it was, on my part, the final outburst of an aging man, and, on her own part, the simple conceited satisfaction she enjoyed in the attention I paid her. A drop of poison had, moreover, infiltrated very early into our relationship: something older that I happened to know about her, something she might have wanted to tell me about, but about which, always, she had kept silent; which was not enough to make me blame her, but enough to create some mistrust.