Winter Journal

by Paul Auster

  11. 2, rue du Louvre; 1st Arrondissement, Paris. A maid’s room (chambre de bonne) on the top floor of a six-story building facing the Seine. Age 25. Your room was in the back, and what you saw when you looked out the window was a gargoyle thrusting from the bell tower of the church next door—Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, the same church whose bells tolled without interruption on August 24, 1572, ringing out the news of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. When you looked to your left, you saw the Louvre. When you looked to your right, you saw Les Halles, and far off, at the northern edge of Paris, the white dome of Montmartre. This was the smallest space you have ever inhabited, a room so small that only the barest essentials could fit in there: a narrow bed, a diminutive desk and straight-backed chair, a sink, and another straight-backed chair beside the bed, where you kept your one-burner electric hot plate and the single pot you owned, which you used for heating water to make instant coffee and boiled eggs. Toilet down the hall; no shower or bath. You lived there because you were low on money and the room had been given to you for free. The agents of this extraordinary act of generosity were your friends Jacques and Christine Dupin (the very best and kindest of friends—may their names be hallowed forever), who lived downstairs in a large apartment on the second floor, and because this was a Haussmann-era building, their apartment came with an extra room for a maid on the top floor. You lived alone. Once again, you and your girlfriend had failed to make a go of it, and once again you had split up. She was living in the west of Ireland by then, sharing a turf-heated cottage with a high school friend a few miles outside of Sligo, and although you went to Ireland at one point to try to win her back, your gallant gesture went for naught, since her heart had become entangled with that of a young Irishman, and you had walked in at an early juncture of their affair (which eventually came to naught as well), meaning that you had mistimed your trip, and you left the green, windy hills of Sligo wondering if you would ever see her again. You returned to your room, to the loneliness of your room, that smallest of small rooms that sometimes drove you out in search of prostitutes, but it would be wrong to say you were unhappy there, for you had no trouble adjusting to your reduced circumstances, you found it invigorating to learn that you could get by on almost nothing, and as long as you were able to write, it made no difference where or how you lived. Day after day throughout the months you were there, construction crews worked directly across from your building, digging an underground parking garage four or five levels deep. At night, whenever you went to your window and looked down at the excavated earth, at the vast hole spreading in the ground below you, you would see rats, hundreds of wet, gleaming rats running through the mud.

  12. 29, rue Descartes; 5th Arrondissement, Paris. Another two-room apartment with a sit-down kitchen, on the fourth floor of a six-story building. Age 26. A number of well-paying freelance jobs had lifted you out of penury, and your finances were now robust enough for you to sign a lease on another apartment. Your girlfriend had returned from Sligo, the Irishman was no longer in the picture, and once again the two of you decided to join forces and take another stab at living together. This time, things went fairly smoothly, not without some bumps along the way, perhaps, but less jolting ones than previously, and neither one of you threatened to walk out on the other. The apartment at 29, rue Descartes was surely the most pleasant space you occupied in Paris. Even the concierge was pleasant (a pretty young woman with short blonde hair who was married to a cop, always smiling, always with a friendly word, unlike the snooping, ill-tempered crones who traditionally managed Paris apartment buildings), and you were glad to be living in this part of town, the middle of the old Latin Quarter, just up the hill from the place de la Contrescarpe, with its cafés, restaurants, and vivid, boisterous, theatrical open-air market. But the good freelance jobs of the past year were drying up, and once again your resources were dwindling. You figured you would be able to hang on until the end of the summer, and then you would have to pack it in and return to New York. At the last minute, however, your stay in France was unexpectedly prolonged.

  13. Saint Martin; Moissac-Bellevue, Var. A farmhouse in southeastern Provence. Two stories, immensely thick stone walls, red-tile roof, dark green shutters and doors, several acres of surrounding fields flanked by a national forest on one side and a dirt road on the other: the middle of nowhere. One of the stones above the front door was engraved with the words L’An VI—year six—which you took to mean the sixth year of the revolution, suggesting that the house was built in 1794 or 1795. Age 26 to 27. You and your girlfriend spent nine months as caretakers of that remote southern property, living there from early September 1973 to the end of May 1974, and although you have already written about some of the things that happened to you in that house (The Red Notebook, Story No. 2), there was much that you did not talk about in those five pages. When you think about the time you spent in that part of the world now, what comes back to you first is the air, the scents of thyme and lavender that rose up around you whenever you walked through the fields that bordered the house, the redolent air, the muscular air when the wind was blowing, the languorous air when the sun lowered itself into the valley and lizards and salamanders crawled out from crevices in the stones to drowse in the heat, and then the dryness and roughness of the country, the gray, molten rocks, the chalky white soil, the red earth along certain paths and stretches of road, the scarab beetles in the forest pushing their mountainous spheres of dung, the magpies swooping over the fields and neighboring vineyards, the flocks of sheep that passed through the meadow just beyond the house, the sudden apparitions of sheep, hundreds of sheep bunched together and moving forward with the clattering sounds of their bells, the violence of the mistrals, the windstorms that would last for seventy-two unbroken hours, shaking every window, every shutter, every door and loosened tile of the house, the yellow broom that covered the hillsides in spring, the flowering almond tress, the rosemary bushes, the scrubby, stunted live oaks with gnarled trunks and shimmering leaves, the frigid winter that forced you to close off the second floor of the house and live in the three downstairs rooms, warmed by an electric heater in one and a wood fire in another, the ruins of the chapel on a nearby cliff where the Knights Templar used to stop on their way to fight in the Crusades, the static coming through your enfeebled transistor radio in the middle of the night for two weeks running as you strained to listen to the U.S. Armed Forces broadcasts from Frankfurt of the Mets versus Cincinnati in the National League play-offs, the Mets versus Oakland in the World Series, and then the hailstorm you were thinking about the other day, the icy stones hammering against the terra-cotta roof and melting on the grass around the house, not as large as baseballs, perhaps, but golf balls for nine-foot men, followed by the one time it snowed and everything briefly turned white, and your nearest neighbor, a bachelor tenant farmer living alone with his truffle dog in a crumbling yellow house and dreaming of world revolution, the shepherds drinking in the hilltop bar of Moissac-Bellevue, their hands and faces black with dirt, the dirtiest men you have ever seen, and everyone speaking with the rolling r’s of the southern French accent, the added g’s that turned the words for wine and bread into vaing and paing, the s’s dropped elsewhere in France still surviving their Provençal origins, turning étrangers into estrangers (strangers, foreigners), and all through the region the rocks and walls painted with the slogan Occitanie Libre!, for this was the medieval land of oc and not of oui, and yes, you and your girlfriend were estrangers that year, but how much softer life was in this part of the country when compared to the brittle formalities and edginess of Paris, and how warmly you were treated during your time in the south, even by the stuffy, bourgeois couple with the impossible name of Assier de Pompignon, who would occasionally invite you to their house in the adjacent village of Régusse to watch films on TV, not to mention the people you came to know in Aups, seven kilometers from the house, where you went on your twice-weekly shopping expeditions, a town of three or four thousand people that came
to feel like a vast metropole as the months of isolation rolled on, and because there were only two principal cafés in Aups, the right-wing café and the left-wing café, you frequented the left-wing café, where you were welcomed in by the regulars, the scruffy farmers and mechanics who were either Socialists or Communists, the rowdy, talkative locals who grew increasingly fond of the young American estrangers, and you remember sitting with them in that bar as you all watched the 1974 presidential election returns on TV, the campaign between Giscard and Mitterrand following Pompidou’s death, the hilarity and ultimate disappointment of that evening, everyone soused and cheering, everyone soused and cursing, but also in Aups there was your friend the butcher’s son, more or less your age, who worked in his father’s shop and was being groomed to take over the business, but at the same time a passionate and highly skilled photographer, who spent that year documenting the evacuation and demolition of a small village that was scheduled to be inundated for the construction of a dam, the butcher’s son with his heartbreaking photographs, the drunken men in the Socialist/Communist bar, but also the dentist in Draguignan, the man your girlfriend had to visit again and again for the complicated root-canal work he performed on her, all the many hours she spent in his chair, and when the work was finally done and he presented her with the bill, it came to all of three hundred francs (sixty dollars), a sum so low, so incommensurate with the time and effort he had expended on her, that she asked him why he had charged her so little, to which he responded, with a wave of the hand and a diffident little shrug, “Forget it. I was young once myself.”

  14. 456 Riverside Drive; in the middle of the long block between West 116th Street and West 119th Street, Manhattan. Two rooms with a razor-thin galley kitchen between them, the northern penthouse or tenth floor of a nine-story building overlooking the Hudson. Penthouse was a deceptive term in this case, since your apartment and the southern penthouse next to it were not a structural part of the building you lived in. PHN and PHS were located inside a separate, freestanding, flat-roofed, diminutive one-story house built out of white stucco, which sat on the main roof like a peasant hut incongruously transported from the back street of a Mexican village. Age 27 to 29. The interior space was cramped, barely adequate for two people (you and your girlfriend were still together), but affordable New York apartments turned out to be scarce, and after your return from three and a half years abroad, you spent more than a month looking for somewhere to live, anywhere to live, and you felt fortunate to have landed in this airy if too crowded perch. Brilliant light, gleaming hardwood floors, fierce winds blowing off the Hudson, and the singular gift of a large L-shaped roof terrace that equaled or surpassed the square footage of the apartment inside. In warm weather, the roof mitigated the effects of claustrophobia, and you never tired of going out there and looking at the view from the front of the building: the trees of Riverside Park, Grant’s Tomb to the right, the traffic cruising along the Henry Hudson Parkway, and most of all the river, with its spectacle of unceasing activity, the countless numbers of boats and sailing vessels that traveled along its waters, the freighters and tugs, the barges and yachts and cabin cruisers, the daily regatta of industrial ships and pleasure craft that populated the river, which you soon discovered was another world, a parallel world that ran beside the patch of land you inhabited, a city of water just beyond the city of stones and earth. A stray hawk would settle onto the roof every now and then, but most often you were visited by gulls, crows, and starlings. One afternoon, a red pigeon landed outside your window (salmon-colored, speckled with white), a wounded fledgling with fearless curiosity and strange, red-rimmed eyes, and after you and your girlfriend fed him for a week and he was well enough to fly again, he kept coming back to the roof of your apartment, nearly every day for months, so often that your girlfriend eventually gave him a name, Joey, which meant that Joey the pigeon had acquired the status of pet, an outdoor companion who shared his address with you until the following summer, when he flapped his wings one last time and flew away for good. Early on: working from noon to five for a rare-book dealer on East Sixty-ninth Street, writing poems, reviewing books, and slowly reacclimating yourself to America, just as the country was living through the Watergate hearings and the fall of Richard Nixon, which made it a slightly different America from the one you had left. On October 6, 1974, about two months after you moved in, you and your girlfriend were married. A small ceremony held in your apartment, then a party thrown by a friend who lived in a nearby apartment that was much larger than yours. Given the frequent changes of heart that had afflicted the two of you from the beginning, the constant comings and goings, the affairs with other people, the breakups and makeups that followed one another as regularly as the changing of the seasons, the thought that either one of you should have considered marriage at this point now strikes you as an act of delusional folly. At the very least you were taking an enormous risk, gambling on the solidity of your friendship and your shared ambitions as writers to make marriage into something different from what you had already experienced together, but you lost the bet, you both lost because you were destined to lose, and therefore you managed to keep it going for only four years, marrying in October 1974 and calling it quits in November 1978. You were both twenty-seven when you took your vows, old enough to know better, perhaps, but at the same time neither one of you was anywhere close to full adulthood, you were both still adolescents at the core, and the hard truth was that you didn’t have a chance.

  15. 2230 Durant Avenue; Berkeley, California. A small efficiency apartment (two rooms and a kitchenette) across from the college football stadium, within walking distance of the university campus. Age 29. Restless, dissatisfied for no reason you could name, feeling ever more hemmed in by the too-tiny apartment in New York, you were rescued by a sudden infusion of cash (a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation), which opened the door to other possibilities, other solutions to the problem of how and where to live, and since you felt the moment had come to shake things up for yourself, you and your first wife boarded a train in New York, traveled to Chicago, where you disembarked and switched to another train, and then headed for the West Coast, passing through the interminable flatlands of Nebraska, the Rockies, the deserts of Utah and Nevada, and pulled into San Francisco after a three-day journey. It was April 1976. The idea was to test out California for half a year and see if you might not want to move there permanently. You had several good friends in the area, you had visited the previous year and had come away with a favorable impression, and if you chose to conduct your experiment in Berkeley rather than in San Francisco, it was because the rents were lower there and you didn’t have a car, and life without a car would be more manageable on that side of the Bay. The apartment wasn’t much of anything, a low-ceilinged box with a faint odor of mildew and mold when the windows were shut, but not unlivable, not grim. You have no memory of making the decision to rent it, however, because not long after you arrived in town, sometime during the first week, when you were temporarily staying with friends, you were invited to play in a pickup softball game, in the second inning of which, with your back turned to the runner as you stood well out of the baseline waiting for a throw from the outfield, the runner intentionally went out of his way to crash into you from behind, leveling you with a murderous football block (wrong sport), and because he was a large man and you were not prepared for the blow, the collision snapped your head back before you fell to the ground, which caused a severe case of whiplash. (Your attacker, known for his bad sportsmanship and often referred to as “the Animal,” was a highly sophisticated intellectual who went on to write books about seventeenth-century Dutch painting and translate a number of German poets. He turned out to be a former student of a former professor of yours, a man much admired by both of you, and when the Animal was informed of the connection, he was deeply contrite, saying he never would have run into you if he had known who you were. You have always been mystified by this apology. Was he trying to tell you that only f
ormer students of Angus Fletcher’s were exempt from his dirty tactics but all others were fair game? You continue to scratch your head in wonder.) Your friends took you to the emergency room of the local hospital, where you were given a padded, Velcro-adjustable neck brace and a prescription for heavy doses of the muscle relaxant Valium, a drug you had never taken and which you hope you will never have to take again, for efficient as it was in alleviating the pain, it put you in a mindless stupor for the better part of a week, obliterating the memory of events an instant after those events occurred, meaning that several days of your life have been removed from the calendar. You cannot bring back a single thing that happened to you while you were walking around in your Frankenstein-monster neck brace and swallowing those amnesia-inducing pills, and therefore, when you and your first wife moved into the apartment on Durant Avenue, you praised her for having found such conveniently located digs, even though she had consulted with you at length before you both made the decision to live there. You stayed for the six months you had allotted yourselves, but no more. California had much to recommend it, and you fell in love with the landscape, the vegetation, the ever-present aroma of eucalyptus in the air, the fogs and all-encompassing showers of light, but after a while you found yourself missing New York, the vastness and confusion of New York, for the better you came to know San Francisco, the smaller and duller it seemed to you, and while you had no problem living in remotest seclusion (the nine months in the Var, for example, which had been an intensely fertile time for you), you decided that if you were going to live in a city, it had to be a big city, the biggest city, meaning that you could embrace the extremes of far-flung rural places and massive urban places, both of which seemed inexhaustible to you, but small cities and towns used themselves up too quickly, and in the end they left you cold. So you went back to New York in September, reclaimed the little apartment overlooking the Hudson (which had been rented out to a subtenant), and dug in again. But not for long. In October, the good news, the much-hoped-for news that a child was on the way—which meant that you would have to find another place to live. You wanted to stay in New York, you fully expected to stay in New York, but New York was too expensive, and after several months of searching for a larger apartment that you could afford, you accepted defeat and started looking elsewhere.