The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  From the Mountain of the West we were taken to spend the night at the Hot Springs, formerly frequented by the French of Indochina, who came to Kounming to rest, not too far from their home port, in a climate cooled by the altitude. The hotel was still outfitted as a thermal establishment, so that in the early morning I could, like someone taking the cure, bathe in warm water coming directly from the springs. To do this, I had only to go down several stairways and corridors, and then, having taken possession of a room including, along with the bathroom and the alcove for the shower, a vestibule equipped with more than one needed in the way of furniture for resting, linen for drying oneself, and pairs of slippers, to descend again a fairly large number of steps and, having reached catacomb-like depths, to descend still farther by immersing myself in the rectangular tank provided with a slatted bottom and with two round seats entirely submerged.

  The farthest stage of my tour through the provinces of the southwest, the Hot Springs represents, along with Kounming, the southernmost point of China that I reached. The humidity there resulted for me in a disappointment concerning the convenience of shirts made of synthetic cloth on excursions during which one does not have time to send clothes to be washed: if ordinarily they dry quickly, it is not the same in a place where dampness prevails and, when we left the Hot Springs, I had to put back on, damp, the nylon shirt that I had innocently washed before going to bed. This tropical impression contrasted with the really quite Nordic impression I had had of the first town in Manchuria where we stopped: Changchun, whose forbidding appearance reminded me of Charleville (where I have never been, but which, through the prism of Rimbaud, I imagine to be the most disagreeable of cities). Crisscrossed by tramways with very sonorous horns and plowed by carts drawn by robust little white horses with short-cropped manes, this town of houses without any picturesqueness seemed to me inhabited by people with quilted jackets, their hands snugly thrust into their sleeves as though into muffs, and some of them wore fur caps on their heads with the ear flaps, designed to protect them against the chill, hanging down. As I was suffering from a bad cold and my abdomen was affected by a disorder even more bothersome (the consequences of a European-style lunch accepted two days before at the Peking Hotel, contrary to my habit of eating only Chinese-style, for which I had always felt all the better), I was peremptorily subjected to a medical examination. Scarcely an hour after our arrival, the kind Wang Yuen-chen entered my room escorted by two women, one of whom was a lady doctor wearing two braids and the other a nurse in the classic costume of her profession. Wang Yuen-chen seated herself familiarly on the arm of the easy chair I was occupying, facing my two healers, and it was through her as intermediary that the questioning took place. I was very much afraid that too zealous a concern for my health would lead the lady doctor to send me to the hospital, which would have been in itself an interesting experience and no doubt an occasion for pampering, but would have deprived me of quite a few touristic joys. The thermometer they placed in my armpit indicated a normal temperature, and I could, furthermore, declare in all good faith that my other troubles seemed to be over. This was why the gentle and serious lady doctor confined herself to giving me some medicines for the cough and allowed me to continue on my way through the region, where the autumn was proving less sunny than that of Peking.

  The little girl of sugar candy, with braids of licorice, takes our hand to lead us to the butterflies club, a Marxist-Leninist Monelle. In Shanghai, whose streets swarm with a crowd more turbulent than that of the capital and where what was once the neighborhood of the foreign concessions presents an example of perhaps the most distressing products of Western architecture, I saw, on the site of the English racecourse, now the People’s Park, and its outbuildings, troupes of children who were apparently participating with the same enthusiasm in outdoor exercises and lecture-walks: dances and processions on the grounds where gambling and the spectacle of the races must, in their time, have attracted sporting people of both races; murmuring files of schoolboys and schoolgirls, under the tutelage of young women or girls, passing through the Historical Museum, whose rooms occupy two stories in the buildings adjoining the old grandstands. I admired the fact that they had spared these buildings, and it seemed to me I had here a proof of the practical sense and goodwill of the Chinese revolutionaries, who had changed into an instrument of education what others (without one being able, in this precise case, to tax them with vandalism) would probably have burned down or degraded in some manner, seeing them only as a scandalous symbol of foreign ascendancy and the corruption inherent in capitalism. Once night fell, when an account of the day came to feed my logbook as usual, I noted what had most struck me among the two thousand or so objects that were displayed in this museum, already rich even though still embryonic. Arranged chronologically, the collections included—without mentioning the generally not very encouraging products of modern handicrafts—many very beautiful things of bronze, jade, ceramic, porcelain, stone, clay, and wood, some paintings (notably from the Song period) and other evidence of the past that, quite beyond any aesthetic consideration, one could not look at without emotion, such as some documents relating to writing (a large tortoise shell and a bovine humerus engraved with ancient characters, many secular manuscripts, as well as old specimens of printing on paper, that Chinese invention), such as, also, tools found in Zhoukoudian, where the illustrious prehominid lived and died whom modern schoolbooks present as the first great man in the history of China.

  A single thread that has never been broken, from Sinanthropus Pekinensis to comrade Mao Tse-tung. Contemplating, from the top of the twelve skillfully piled stories of a pagoda broad at the base but narrower at the top, a superb river spectacle (in the setting sun and under a sky fairly cloudy in the direction of the mountain, the progress of a line of eight pairs of delicately colored junks pulled by a tug over the shimmering water, while a train crossed the metal bridge spanning the broad elbow of the estuary they call “Chou” at this point because of its snaking form), several of us, at the close of our visit to Hangzhou and its environs, dreamed of a new Prayer on the Acropolis: no Greek miracle, in this case, but the miracle of China, a country where an amazing harmony reigns between past and present, monuments and living beings, a country, too, whose gardens share with those created by the Arabs the honor of being “places of real spiritual comfort.” This last observation we had made that same morning, one of my companions and I, in the course of an excursion out onto a lake during which our group had been taken to an island crowded with summer houses by a flotilla of light craft propelled some by boatmen, some by boatwomen.

  The exemplary power supposedly possessed by Negroes—like all those who are called “savages”—to abandon themselves without reticence to the pulsations of life (as their gift for rhythm would suffice to attest), the serene gravity of the people of the Far East, whose mysterious cast of features is purportedly explained by their friendly relations with death, are simplistic notions, if not fallacious ones; but the fact is that they exert on me the seductiveness of the great utopias. For the Westerner that I am, they represent two poles, each of which would indicate a possible truth, and I believe I have aimed at both these two goals, one after the other, beyond my immediate motivations: the first when, still young, I devoted twenty-one months to crossing Africa, the second when, a quarter of a century later, I spent five weeks in China, a trip whose ridiculous brevity suited me, in that, under the twofold weight of age and a gradually regularized life, I had become more covetous of my time and less available in a practical sense. Tropics loaded with “involuntary poetry,” a Far East wise and courteous as one no longer can be, the industrialization of countries whose exoticism had charmed us, so that we have trouble accepting the idea that they are gradually losing it, daydreams based on their past (at least the past one imagined), hopes justified by what one sees of their present—these form the background of a dream that I had in China and that, for me, would still be lost in total oblivion if it had not been reca
lled to me, long after our return, by one of my comrades to whom I had described it because he was the hero of it: just as, in Polynesia, beautiful islanders give travelers large collars of flowers that each will wear around his neck as though he were the Fatted Calf, young Chinese girls in new-style jackets and pants offer bicycle tires or inner tubes to that companion of mine, who, for the film he was to entitle A Sunday in Peking, at that time took his camera with him everywhere.

  Easter in Kumasi. Underlined with a wavy stroke, these words—which remind me of colors harsher than the delicate nuances of Sunday at Peking—appear at the head of four of my slips of paper, a copy of an extract from the notebook that I kept during my tour through the Ivory Coast and through the Gold Coast, which now no longer bears a name that also alluded to the era of trade. That Sunday, April 1, 1945, having been in residence for several days in the large market town that is the Ashanti capital, I had gone to the cathedral to enjoy the spectacle of the high mass, a ceremony in which the priest—a White, of what nationality I do not know—officiated in person, assisted by two Dutch Fathers. It was here that I experienced not my Easter in New York, like the poet and globetrotter Blaise Cendrars, but that African Easter that I would later call my Easter in Kumasi.

  When I entered, the church was completely swarming with a Negro crowd in which the women in printed calico and madras, the men in loincloths draped so that one shoulder was left bare, were far more numerous than the people dressed in European style. It was the end of eight o’clock mass, they were handing out the communion, and an enormous number of the faithful were filing up to receive it. I mingled at first with the marvelously motley crowd that filled the nave and I felt good there, experiencing that impression of peace, or immemorial understanding with nature, that, utopianly, I have always sought among Blacks. I would not have dreamed of extricating myself from this crowd if several women had not made me understand by signs that my proper place was in the choir. Docile, I walked in the direction of the main altar and sat down, in the right part of the choir, on the first seat I saw available. However, it was soon evident to me that by thus installing myself I had committed another blunder: this side of the area occupied by Whites was not that of the Europeans, who were all gathered in the left part of the choir, but the side of the Levantine tradesmen. No one, this time, signaled to me to move. Thus I did not pursue any further my concern to conform to the correct rule, as the dumb show of the ladies in madras had engaged me to do.

  Right away, I had recognized one of the two servers of the mass as the bearded ecclesiastic whom I had met the day before, when I cast a first glance inside the frightful cathedral, and with whom I had talked about the investigation in which I was participating. It included, among other points, the clarification of the motives for which, each year, workers poured into the Gold Coast surreptitiously from the French territories to work in the mines or on the plantations, whereas our administration wondered how, after the suppression of forced labor, it would cope with the shortage of manpower from which the south of the Ivory Coast suffered endemically. The motives were in truth quite simple, and amounted more or less to this: among the English they were paid in cash, they had more freedom in the way they lived, and the Kumasi market abounded in Manchester cotton goods and other handsome articles which upon their return they could present to their relatives, they themselves dressed with ostentation and covered with pride for having gotten lucky in a City of Light no less rich in pleasures than in manufactured products. Such was, at least, the mirage that attracted the immigrants, for a good number of them remained without work, and, not daring to go back after such a failure, only swelled the city’s mob. If one was to believe the good Father, the Kumasi prison was packed with those unemployed who had become delinquents, and as for the luckier ones, what they gained from the attraction that had been exerted on their imagination by what was said about the Ashanti Babylon was to bring back home, besides sleeping sickness, ailments of venereal origin.

  Inhabitants, in heteroclite costumes, of a Babylon or a merchant city like Alexandria—this was how I saw the people of all ages, sexes, and other categories with which the cathedral was full to bursting. In the back, black soldiers in uniforms of khaki drill enhanced, in the case of the musicians, by a sort of bright red vest. At the organ, a choir of young men in long crimson tunics gathered at the waist. Almost everywhere, packs of children and adolescents dressed in various ways. Not only was there a great troop of little Negro boys in the surplices of choirboys, as well as a significant group of little Negro girls clothed in little white dresses with sky-blue edges and coiffed with a sort of American sailor cap, also white and edged in sky blue, but a fairly numerous gang of brats sat on the ground, in the center space, and more had to be chased from behind the high altar because they were blocking the aisle. These young people did not always display the proper composure, and I saw one small boy—one of the occupants of the passageway—entertain himself during the entire ceremony with the cord that he must usually have worn around his neck but that, in the circumstance, served him as an instrument for those string games so appreciated by ethnographers because the figures obtained by the variable crisscrossings determined by the positions and movements of the fingers of the two hands placed opposite each other seem to correspond to very ancient symbolic systems.

  The mass was said, and the server I knew read in English some sort of pastoral letter or pious text that was translated into Ashanti by a black man of about fifty, a lean man with a small mustache whose clothing was that of a perfect gentleman. Then the priest, miter on his head and crozier in his hand, sitting with his back to the altar, delivered a sermon that the same interpreter translated a little at a time, during the pauses the priest allowed for this purpose. Despite the difficulties that a foreign language presents to me more than anyone else (even English, though I have studied it and fairly often have the opportunity to speak it), I understood that one of the themes of the sermon was the story of Jonas, because of the several scraps of the priest’s remarks that I understood, and especially because of the frequent repetition of the name, easily identifiable, of the man in the whale. This story, despite my lack of belief, touches me in a very special way, and it is not without good reason that a certain philosopher—in one of the books he has devoted to what he calls the material imagination—attributes to the “Jonas complex” one of the most spontaneous pieces I have ever written, a half oneiric expression of a profound desire: to descend into the thickness of the organic night and thus return to the original matrix, like the prophet swallowed by the marine monster that is a refuge for him at the same time as a jail. Even though this episode is linked, I believe, to the promise of a resurrection and it is therefore normal for one to refer to it in a paschal sermon, the priest’s recalling of it struck me as much as if it had been meant for me personally, by virtue of some decree of fate.

  It all ended with a Hallelujah! to the strong beat of the soldiers’ bass drum and snares. Preceded by the cross and traveling with slow steps the entire length of the central nave, the prelate effected a theatrical exit which, as soon as he was outside, turned into a procession. First came two lines of beautiful, robust young black girls in long dresses of a strong blue edged in white (probably Children of Mary), bareheaded with their frizzy hair cut very short, so that one could admire in all its purity the shape of the skull. Escorting the cross and the bishop, next came the young men of the choir, in their crimson tunics. As for the soldiers, they went off in their own direction, in a double phalanx: the drums on one side, the brasses much farther away. Perhaps these were the same musicians whom, toward the end of the preceding day, I had seen enliven the revels of a parade of ordinary folk led by two clowns in disguises that looked medieval, their faces masked with cowls of a sort painted pink like European faces? In the end, the festival at which a curiosity more frivolous than scholarly had induced me to be present—that turbulent and colorful Easter whose accompaniment, both instrumental and vocal, moved me to the same
extent as the negro spirituals that I apparently heard in the middle of the cotton fields, somewhere in the region of Louisiana—appeared to me one of those events that, after the fact, give the impression not merely of being valuable in themselves but of having been produced because we were the only ones completely capable of experiencing them. Since then, I have now and then thought that if I did not return to Catholicism that day (as it seemed to me I was invited to do by that Negro crowd and that sermon, whose translation by fragments conferred more solemnity on it, and a poetry that probably was not present in it), it was because, decidedly, my childhood beliefs have truly abandoned me!

  A Sunday more Sunday than the real Sundays, in Peking, the great day of the Chinese national festival, which was the pretext for the trip in a delegation, in which the filmmaker Chris Marker had taken part, like me. A Sunday officially Sunday and perhaps the only authentic one for the whole of Christianity, that Easter Sunday which, after my earliest youth, had lost for me all its brilliance, but momentarily recovered it as I saw it celebrated in one of the ugliest colonial buildings that existed in Kumasi. On the Gold Coast and in China, I had enjoyed a spectacle that, in both cases (despite the smaller size of the African festival), were presented somewhat as a Last Judgment in which all—each in the position assigned to him—would find themselves gathered in hope rather than in terror: the Ashanti Easter, with its various cohorts of angels and the strict order that placed, opposite the more numerous, shifting and colorful crowd with which the nave was filled, to the right of the bearer of the good word the Europeans with their formal manner, and to his left, the Levantines whom only after a certain time I had been able to distinguish from the former; the commemorative festival in which all of Chinese life had appeared to me to be summarized in a single procession, at the foot of an edifice that goes back to the Ming era, the “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” today transformed into a grandstand for the people of influence and the most prominent guests of the People’s Republic. However, it is certain that in Kumasi I had followed as at the theater (allowing myself to be moved but remaining at a distance) the service that I nevertheless would have readily believed to be ordered quite expressly to open me to Grace, whereas in Peking, being present at that parade with respect to which I was no more than a small particle, I had taken part in a ceremony in which, actor as much as spectator, I assumed a modest but precise function: that of a member of one of the groups whose coming from western Europe was in itself a gesture of friendship toward the Revolution. If (to judge from my own reaction and what I was able to grasp of my companions’) the Peking festival was essentially just as religious as the Kumasi festival, there was this difference between the two demonstrations: one corresponded to a pure mythology, Christianity with its ideas of God made man, the immortal soul, and resurrection; the other to a hope that cannot fail to be a myth as well (for one can only dream of humanity being mistress of its destiny), but a myth that, nevertheless, contains a reality—the possibility of social transformations such that the subman may no longer be more than a pathological case—and that invites one to a form of action whose prospects, in no way supernatural, though excessive in relation to the limits of a single individual’s life, do not exceed those of the merely terrestrial adventure of the species to which we belong.