Alibis

by André Aciman

  I had only to look at the way rue Delta led to the shore and I instantly remembered writing the scene about my brother and how he and I had walked there on our last night in Egypt. All I remembered was not what had happened there decades ago, but simply the fiction I’d written. I remembered something I knew was a lie. We had stopped there, purchased something to eat, and then crossed the coast road and heaved ourselves up to sit on that exact same spot on a stone wall along the seafront, watching the Mediterranean by night with its constellation of fishing boats glimmering on the horizon. I could see my brother as he was then and as he is now, gazing at the wild procession of Egyptian children waving their Ramadan lanterns along the sandbanks, disappearing behind a jetty, reappearing farther off along the shore. I tried to remind myself that he was no longer present in the final version of this very scene, that I’d removed him from it and that I’d sat overlooking the sea by myself. But however I tried to reason with the memory of that first version, he kept popping back on rue Delta, as though his image, like a Freudian screen-memory, or like an afterimage, a shadow memory, no matter how many times I suppressed it, was a truth that was pointless, even dishonest, to dismiss, even though I knew I had never been on that walk with or without him.

  Today, when I try to visualize rue Delta by night, the only picture that comes to mind is one with my brother. He is wearing shorts, a sweater slung around his neck, and is headed to the seafront, already savoring the sandwich he is planning to buy at a corner shop called the Falafel Pasha. I have no other memories of rue Delta. Even the memory of my return visit has begun to fade. What I certainly can’t remember is the real rue Delta, the rue Delta as I envisioned it before writing Out of Egypt. That rue Delta is forever lost.

  Afterword

  Parallax

  I was born in Alexandria, Egypt. But I am not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I am not Turkish. I was sent to British schools in Egypt but I am not British. My family became Italian citizens and I learned to speak Italian but my mother tongue is French. For years as a child I was under the misguided notion that I was a French boy who, like everyone else I knew in Egypt, would soon be moving back to France. “Back” to France was already a paradox, since virtually no one in my immediate family was French or had ever even set foot in France. But France—and Paris—was my soul home, my imaginary home, and will remain so all my life, even if, after three days in France, I cannot wait to get out. Not a single ounce of me is French.

  I am African by birth, everyone in my family is from Asia Minor, and I live in America. And yet, though I lived in Europe for no more than three years, I consider myself profoundly, ineradicably European—the way I remain profoundly, ineradicably Jewish, though I have no faith in God, know not one Jewish ritual, and have gone to more churches in a year than I’ve gone to synagogues in a decade. Unlike my ancestors the Marranos who were Jews claiming to be Christians, I enjoy being a Jew among Christians so long as I can pass for a Christian among Jews.

  I am an unreal Jew, the way I am an imaginary European. An imaginary European many times over.

  I spent the first fourteen years of my life in Egypt dreaming and fantasizing about living in Europe. I belonged in Europe; Egypt as far as I was concerned was simply an error that needed to be redressed. I had no love for Egypt and couldn’t wait to leave; it had no love for me and did, in the end, ask me to leave. The beauty of Alexandria, of the Mediterranean, of being in a place that history had labored centuries to set in place meant nothing to me. Even the beach couldn’t seduce me. If on a November day the totally deserted beaches of Alexandria seemed to belong to me and to no one else on this planet, and if the sea on those magnificently limpid mornings wasn’t capable of raising a single ripple, then all I needed to seize the magic of the moment was one illusion: that this beach was not in Egypt but in Europe, and preferably in Greece. Indeed, whenever I saw a beautiful Greek or Roman statue in Egypt, I would automatically think of Greece, not of a Greek statue in Egypt. A Greek statue in Egypt was simply waiting to be taken back to its rightful place in Athens, even if the rightful place for a Hellenistic statue was, in fact, not Athens but Alexandria. A beautiful Mediterranean mansion on the Pacific Ocean is basically asking me to imagine it is—and by extension that I am—in Italy, not in Beverly Hills. If a beach in Egypt reminded me of pictures I had seen of Capri, or if a narrow cobble lane made me think of towns in Provence, the impulse was not to enjoy either spot for what it was—a beautiful place—but as a simulacrum desperately yearning to be repatriated, i.e., brought back to Europe. This counterfactual circuit, this distortion and dislocation, allowed me to live in Egypt.

  When I remember Alexandria it’s not only Alexandria I remember. When I remember Alexandria, I remember a place from which I liked to imagine being already elsewhere. To remember Alexandria without remembering myself in Alexandria longing for Paris is to remember wrongly.

  Being in Egypt was an endless process of pretending I was already out of Egypt.

  Not to see this fundamental distortion is to distort memory.

  Not to see it as an enduring habit of mind is to forget that I can no longer see anything unless I am able to manufacture or extract similar distortions everywhere. Art is nothing more than an exalted way of stylizing distortions that have become unbearable.

  One of my most illuminating and intimate moments in Egypt came with a very old aunt. One evening, as I stepped into her bedroom, I caught her staring at the sea. She didn’t turn around but simply made room for me at the window and together we stared at the dark, quiet sea. “This,” she said, “reminds me of La Seine.”

  She told me that she’d once lived very near the Seine. She missed the Seine. She missed Paris. Alexandria had never really been her home. But neither, for that matter, had Paris. Her view of things confirmed my own feelings. Ours was merely the copy of an original that awaited us in Europe. Anything Alexandrian was a simulated version of something authentically European.

  By a curious distortion, however, no sooner had I linked our Alexandrian beach with the Seine than I instantly learned to be a bit more forgiving of our beaches in Egypt, and ultimately perhaps to allow myself to nurse some love for Alexandria, because it refracted something irreducibly European. Like my aunt, I needed this detour out to an imaginary Seine and back to a derealized Alexandria to begin to see what stood before my very eyes.

  This detour is simply an ancillary version of the distortion I mentioned above. What you see before you summons an imaginary elsewhere. But it is through the conduit of this imaginary elsewhere that you begin to see what’s right before you. This kind of detour and distortion simply plays out an inability to connect with the present and consummate experience.

  Some of us approach experience, love, life itself, through similar detours. We need to reroute our contempt before realizing that what we have in our hearts is not contempt at all.

  Photographers call this parallax. Not only are the things before us unstable, but our point of observation is no less unstable. Because observation itself, like memory, like thinking, like writing, like identity, and ultimately like desire is an unstable gesture, an unstable move. We snap a picture, hoping to gather one picture, when in fact the real picture is an infinite imbrication of unstable images.

  * * *

  Once my family was expelled from Egypt and settled in Europe, we were of course surprised to see that the Europe we mistook for home was no home at all. The alleged repatriation took us to a land that turned out to be more foreign and unfamiliar than what had stood before our very noses for decades in Egypt. Suddenly—and nostalgia is itself a source of many distortions—we became homesick for Alexandria. We grew attached to anything in Europe that reminded us of Alexandria—i.e., we looked for certain spots, for certain moments, inflections of sunlight, vague scents of seawater in Europe that would help evoke our lost Egypt. The detour, so to speak, had come full circle and was about to spiral on to a second remove.

  What in Africa had seem
ed a poor copy of something authentically European became like a sacred original; copies could be found everywhere in Europe, but the original was forever lost. By a curious distortion, going to Capri was not only an attempt to recapture Egypt and, through this detour once again, to grow to accept and, at best, to like what, for better or for worse, was going to be our new home in Italy; it was also an attempt to bring ourselves to cherish the fact that the long-yearned-for repatriation had indeed finally taken place. It was like visiting my aunt’s home in Paris and standing at her window and saying to her, “Remember when we stood this way before the sea one evening and dreamed of being in Paris? Well, we’re finally in Paris now.”

  Except that Paris had no value whatsoever unless you invoked—parallactically—its shadow partner, Alexandria.

  What we missed was not just Egypt. What we missed was dreaming Europe in Egypt—what we missed was the Egypt where we’d dreamed of Europe.

  * * *

  The situation grew infinitely more tangled as soon as I left Europe and moved to America. It’s not that Alexandria took a back seat in my mind—it did not; it remained and would always remain, in Lawrence Durrell’s words, “the capital of memory.” It was just that, as soon as I lost Europe, Europe once again began to exert its pull on my mind, and all the more forcefully now as my once-imagined Europe in Egypt doubled into a now-remembered-Europe in America. In fact, longing and recollection, yearning and nostalgia, have been confusing their signals so much over the years that I am by now perfectly willing to accept that memory and imagination are twins who live along an artificial border that allows them to lead double lives and smuggle coded messages back and forth.

  Parallax is not just a disturbance in vision. It’s a derealizing and paralyzing disturbance in the soul—cognitive, metaphysical, intellectual, and ultimately aesthetic. It is not just about displacement, or of feeling adrift both in time and space, it is a fundamental misalignment between who we are, might have been, could still be, can’t accept we’ve become, or may never be. You assume you are not quite like others and that to understand others, to be with others, to love others, and to be loved by them, you need to think other thoughts than the ones that come naturally. To be with others you must be the opposite of who you are; to read others, you must read the opposite of what you see; to be somewhere, you must suspect you are or could be elsewhere. This is the irrealis-mood. You feel, you imagine, you think, and ultimately write counterfactually, because writing speaks this disturbance, investigates it, because writing also perpetuates and consolidates it and hopes to make sense of it by giving it a form.

  The German writer W. G. Sebald, who died in 2001, frequently wrote about people whose lives are shattered and who are trapped in a state of numbness, stagnation, and stunned sterility. Given a few displacements, which occurred either by mistake or through some whim of history, they end up living the wrong life. The past interferes and contaminates the present, while the present looks back and distorts the past.

  Sebald’s characters see displacements everywhere, not just all around them but within themselves as well. Sebald himself cannot think, cannot see, cannot remember, and, I would wager, cannot write without positing displacement as a foundational metaphor.

  In order to write you either retrieve displacement or you invent it.

  It doesn’t matter whether this displacement is recollected or imagined or anticipated. That you can no longer tell the difference may not be just a symptom of the disturbance; it is the cause of it as well. A displaced person is not only in the wrong place, but he also leads or feels he leads the wrong life. This doesn’t mean, however, that because he leads the wrong life, or lives in the wrong place, or has acquired a new name, or speaks or writes in a new language, that there is out there a real life or a real home or a true language. Exile disappears the very notion of a home, of a name, of a tongue. The exile no longer knows what he’s exiled from.

  * * *

  Let me give a few short parables.

  There is a “move” that has become a standing source of humor among my friends. With my friend A, when I go to have dinner at his house on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, it goes something like this. At some point in the evening, as we’re watching the sun set and cast the most luminous shades of orange on the clear waters of the Hudson, a lit barge or Circle Line boat will eventually come into view, and A will unavoidably say, to tease me, “Ah, yes, a bateau mouche. We must be in Paris.”

  He’s hit home, and I know he knows it, just as he knows I know he knows it. It doesn’t matter whether I’m imagining being in Paris or whether I’m remembering Paris—as far as this move is concerned, memory and imagination are interchangeable. You’re here, the mind is elsewhere. Or let me put it in somewhat darker terms: You’re not here. But everything else is.

  Or to put it in yet more alarming terms—and this ties directly to a vision of identity that a Holocaust survivor once shared with me—Part of me, he said, never came with me. It never took the ship. It simply got left behind.

  I don’t know what this means. But it made an impression on me, and the more I think of it, the more it rings uncannily true: Part of me didn’t come with me. Part of me isn’t with me, is never with me. The French philosopher Merleau-Ponty was fond of evoking the phantom limb syndrome, where amputees feel excruciating pain in a limb that no longer exists on their body. Memory can sometimes bring to the senses things that the senses should realistically no longer be able to feel. But suddenly, because of this mnemonic parallax, of this shadow partner distorting everything, we’re reminded of how we are torn in two. Torn from our past, from a home, from ourselves.

  This feeling of being cut off from oneself or of being in two places at the same time is as though what was left behind were an amputated limb, something that was cut away from us and was not allowed to travel with us—an arm, a grandparent, a baby brother. Except that the arm did not wither, just as the grandparent or baby brother did not die.

  So I am here, across the Atlantic, and this arm is there, beyond Gibraltar. Can I go back and find my arm and put it back where it belongs?

  Of course I cannot! But not because the arm wouldn’t fit any longer. Or because I’ve learned to live without it or have acquired a new and even better one, or developed antic ways to work around my missing limb. What is scary is the thought that what I am today may not be a body minus an arm. It may be the other way around. I am just the arm doing the work of the entire body. The body stayed behind. The arm is all that got away. What took the ship was nothing more than an expendable part of me.

  I am elsewhere. This is what we mean by the word alibi. It means elsewhere. Some people have an identity. I have an alibi, a shadow self.

  No wonder I am thinking bateau mouche when I am with my friend A. No wonder that dinner at his house feels sometimes provisional and strained, that contact between us is ultimately tangential, unfinished, unfulfilling. Most of me is not even with me now. How can I be with him, in the New World, when I’m not even with myself, when part of me is altogether elsewhere?

  * * *

  With my other friend B, we can give this move an extra twist. As we’re walking one Friday evening through a crowded, cobbled main street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which, as we instantly both sense, feels so much like a narrow, festive early-summer crowded square in Aix or in Portofino or in San Sebastián, my friend B will look at me and instantly say: “I know. For you to appreciate this street at all, for you to be on this street you need to think you’re over there.” He is right. Without this transposition, I cannot experience the present. I need this detour, these twists, these alibis, these counterfactual moves. I need this screen, this scrim, this deception to stand and be in the here-and-now.

  * * *

  With my friend C, add yet a subtler torsion. “For this evening to really reach you, you need to be here thinking you’re over there imagining yourself here longing to be over there.” Let me explain.

  C lives in Paris. A few years ago o
ne September afternoon I felt a terrible longing for Paris—I would have called it homesickness, had Paris really been my home—which, as all my friends know, it’s not. I decided to pick up the telephone and call my dear friend C in Paris. After she picked up the receiver, I asked her how was Paris. Her answer did not come as a surprise: “Gray. Paris is always gray these days. It never changes.” That of course is exactly how I remember Paris. “And how is New York?” she asked. She missed New York. I missed Paris.

  I was not where she was but where she wanted to be; and where I thought I wanted to be was precisely where she was.

  When, a few months later, the time came for me to go to Paris, I called her again and said that much as I loved Paris I did not enjoy traveling. Besides, I never found Paris relaxing, I would much rather stay in New York and imagine having wonderful dinners in Paris. “Yes, of course,” she agreed, already annoyed. “Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor.” Exasperation bristled in her voice. “When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

  * * *

  With my friend D, add a new torsion. We’re sitting on her terrace in Brooklyn having dinner. It’s a wonderful dinner—music, food, wine, guests, conversation. As it gets darker, I look over the horizon, and there lies a luminous, magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline just after sunset on a midsummer evening. And it occurs to me that here was something strange indeed, one of the oldest riddles nagging the mind of every New Yorker: Would I rather live in Brooklyn and have the luxury of such a breathtaking view of Manhattan, or would I rather be in beckoning, awe-inspiring Manhattan looking over to Brooklyn but never seeing Manhattan?