My Year in No Man's Bay (19 page)
After that I made my way every day to the suburbsâwithout this excursion my day felt incompleteâand not only the ones to the south. But my main route remained the zigzag back and forth between Montrouge and Gentilly, crisscrossing Nationale 20, into the silence and back again into the racket, as far as Arcueil and Cachan, where, as I had learned in the meantime, Eric Satie had spent the last decade of his life all by himself (the cemetery on the slope above the Bievre, with the stone aqueduct higher up, was sometimes my destination).
Satie was one of the few composers who did not strike me as alien beings, inwardly warped and inaccessible. His pieces came across to me as a quiet, clear conversing, in which a particular voice never rose above the others, and that was musical enough for me. After all, I wanted to be stimulated by something other than music; stimulation by music was not good for me. Or: music that is supposed to open me up must already be inside me.
And I learned furthermore that Satie had also had the habit of walking through these suburbs. Except that he went in the opposite direction, to Montparnasse in Paris, where he might meet his friends at an outdoor café during the years between the wars. I imagined us passing each other now and then, on a side street or by the railroad line that crossed the valley of the Bievre. Apparently he always dressed properly for his excursions into the metropolis, in a dark suit with hat and bow tie, and I, too, was in a period then when I wanted to look more everymanlike than everyman: in custom-made things, including my shirts and even my shoesâwhich proved excellent for walkingânecktie and a broad-brimmed hat, which took the place of an umbrella, and hair as short as I had been advised on every occasion to wear it during my earlier days in society. Sometimes the hallucination of encountering the composer was so powerful that I saw each of us on his side of the street tipping his hat to the other. If I was enamored of an image, a series of notes, a series of sentences, it always meant something to me to be in the native region of the person responsible for it, and even more if this person was long since gone from there, and most of all when he had not been part of an entire group or horde of like-minded others, as happens almost everywhere in metropolises, but had been the only one in his region.
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here in the suburbs I also became friends with the painter, whom I had known for some time from the center of town without our growing closer.
here in the suburbs I also became friends with the painter, whom I had known for some time from the center of town without our growing closer.
Again it was the particular place that altered our relationship. I did not know that he had a studio in Bagneux, still farther to the south, already up in the hills overlooking the Seine. One day I saw him there, coming out of a bistro in the palpably different light and wind. At first sight he immediately seemed different from my Paris acquaintance, who, if not worldly, his glasses propped on his head, at least appeared official (perhaps because he was also a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts). Here he hardly stood out from the tradesmen and local white-collar workers, who, like him, were on their way back to work after a quick lunch. He appeared as inconspicuous as they, and just as formless, or rather unassuming, and yet on closer inspection he had an added air of vulnerability and melancholy that revealed itself to me in the almost
humble way in which he held the door for the others, who took it quite for granted. I sensed in him the shoulders, neck, back of the head, and eyes of a child lost to the world, whoâI followed him secretly as he went on his wayâwas visibly becoming high-spirited.
humble way in which he held the door for the others, who took it quite for granted. I sensed in him the shoulders, neck, back of the head, and eyes of a child lost to the world, whoâI followed him secretly as he went on his wayâwas visibly becoming high-spirited.
And then he was also delighted to see me. We hugged each other, as happens only with two people from the same village who hardly had anything to say to each other and suddenly, each of them alone on a long journey, really become aware of each other for the first time on a dock in New Zealand or at a trading post in the Yukon in Alaska.
I experienced the painter outside the city, far from our usual meeting places, in a moment that had to bond me to him. And it was mutual. He urged me to go with him, wanted to have me along that afternoon when he went on with his work (though invisible behind a screen), and accompanied me, since I had to pick up my son at his school in Paris, many kilometers back to the Périphérique, where we took leave of each other only after a great deal of back-and-forth, as later became our custom when saying goodbye.
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any streets in these suburbs bore the names of resistance fighters or opposition figures killed by the Nazis. Along one of them, rue Victor-Basch in Arcueil, I was acquainted with a particular tree. It was a cherry tree that stood not in an enclosed garden but in a turnout on a street in front of an apartment building, right by the rail line. First came the blossoms, without a single leaf greening, and the trunk was dressed in a swirl of white, dense and lightly flared, piled sky-high and glowing up above more brightly than any spring cloud. Then the blossoms floated away, one day with the April snows or hail, another day with the suburban butterflies. At the beginning of June the fruit was ripe, not tiny like that of a wild cherry but of biblical proportions, and where earlier everything had been white, now everything was a rich red. And on each new day of that week, when I got to the tree, the fruit was unharmed. No blackbirds fell upon it (did the trains streaking incessantly past the tree frighten them off, as elsewhere strips of foil might?). And the occasional passersby there did not help themselves either, although the lowest of the cherries almost caressed their heads; no one even stooped to pick up the plump balls, some of which had split as the wind knocked
them to the asphalt, which became dark and darker from the squashed fruit. Only I ate and ate, first the cherries from the ground, since I had no way of knowing whether an owner might not appear from somewhere, and later those within reach of my toes and fingertips.
any streets in these suburbs bore the names of resistance fighters or opposition figures killed by the Nazis. Along one of them, rue Victor-Basch in Arcueil, I was acquainted with a particular tree. It was a cherry tree that stood not in an enclosed garden but in a turnout on a street in front of an apartment building, right by the rail line. First came the blossoms, without a single leaf greening, and the trunk was dressed in a swirl of white, dense and lightly flared, piled sky-high and glowing up above more brightly than any spring cloud. Then the blossoms floated away, one day with the April snows or hail, another day with the suburban butterflies. At the beginning of June the fruit was ripe, not tiny like that of a wild cherry but of biblical proportions, and where earlier everything had been white, now everything was a rich red. And on each new day of that week, when I got to the tree, the fruit was unharmed. No blackbirds fell upon it (did the trains streaking incessantly past the tree frighten them off, as elsewhere strips of foil might?). And the occasional passersby there did not help themselves either, although the lowest of the cherries almost caressed their heads; no one even stooped to pick up the plump balls, some of which had split as the wind knocked
them to the asphalt, which became dark and darker from the squashed fruit. Only I ate and ate, first the cherries from the ground, since I had no way of knowing whether an owner might not appear from somewhere, and later those within reach of my toes and fingertips.
Then it was clear that the tree was common property, and once, when I saw a painter's ladder in the wide-open lobby of the apartment house, I promptly borrowed it and climbed up to the crown, where the cherries are said to be tasty as nowhere else (and that turned out to be true).
In the village of Rinkolach there had been just such a generally accessible cherry tree, in the middle of the village, or, conversely, was the middle established by the tree? Not only the taste from those days but also that special feeling at the topâmore powerful than being high in the air on a mountain peak, along with the swaying that is probably unique to a cherry treeâthis I rediscovered in the foreign suburb; rediscovered? no, for the very first time this becoming aware of the past occurred: a becoming reflective, a recognizing of something from before, taking its dimensions, a sort of precisionâmemory! It was the semi-shade in which I saw the world so much more clearly and astonishingly (and that remained true from suburb to suburb, out into the forest bay here).
At home we had picked the cherries with our lips, also because with the violent swaying of the branches we had no hand free. And even outside of the fruiting season that tree meant something to us, an unspoken place of asylum: anyone who fled to it could not be harmed in its precinct, and as soon as the pursuers entered, too, it meant that a reconciliation had to take place. And the public cherry tree of Rinkolach still exists; I pass and walk around it at least once a year. It is alive, despite several lightning strikes, it bears fruit, now somewhat sour and watery; except that each time it seems more orphaned (or who is the orphaned one?); no more children, either around it or in it, and if in the meantime another spot has become the middle of the village, I do not find it; but perhaps I do not stay around long enough.
And now I sat, who?, in the tree in Arcueil, hidden, in my custom-made suit and necktie, felt my thirst for cherries diminish at the mere thought of the Bievre down there in the valley, though it had long since gone underground, scraped my fingertips on the fissured, especially sharp
bark of the old cherry wood and sniffed them, to make myself more receptive, receptive just as I still do today on my very own cherry tree, dead except for one branch, here in the bay between the hills of the Seine, in fear of becoming numb and number, starting with my extremities.
bark of the old cherry wood and sniffed them, to make myself more receptive, receptive just as I still do today on my very own cherry tree, dead except for one branch, here in the bay between the hills of the Seine, in fear of becoming numb and number, starting with my extremities.
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thought at the time, no differently from now, that everyone's eyes and ears had to be opened by these things as mine were, and so at the beginning I occasionally invited one person or another from the metropolis, who I thought would have a sense of place, to join me on my pilgrimage beyond the city limits.
thought at the time, no differently from now, that everyone's eyes and ears had to be opened by these things as mine were, and so at the beginning I occasionally invited one person or another from the metropolis, who I thought would have a sense of place, to join me on my pilgrimage beyond the city limits.
Either this was never taken seriously, or while we were out there together hardly anything emerged having to do with the particular region. The region lost its value; did not even begin to reveal it. First of all, as soon as the other person was at my side, I had to fight off a bad mood, as if by his mere presence he were displacing our surroundings, and then most people, and not only the dyed-in-the-wool city dwellers, after at most a brief period of alertness, stopped paying attention, were somewhere else entirely in their thoughts, and what they said neither had anything to do with the landscape we were passing through togetherâwhich was almost all right with meânor was affected, guided, or inspired by it in the slightest (which then enraged me against my companions).
In my imagination they should have stood up straighter, moved their whole bodies, looked around them, spoken in a calmer, deeper, solid voice, and instead they fell in on themselves, stumbled repeatedly, kept their eyes on the ground, and now and then one of them lost his urban-sophisticate tone, which turned out to have been an affectation, and spoke in a labored way, without emphasis and resonance, precisely as one imagines a lifelong resident of the suburbs.
And I was infected by it: I mumbled, hobbled, and stumbled along just like the man next to me, and we two formed a pair that was not merely ludicrous like Bouvard and Pécuchet but also out of place.
Walking with others, I usually experienced something similar to what I had earlier experienced when I read aloud, to a person to whom I felt
close, something I had just written: although I had been glowing with pleasure as I set out with my manuscript to see him, and he, too, had been eager, it was as if each of us scuttled away into a corner, farther and more apart than ever before, and I still have those stranger's eyes before me whenever, after reading aloud, stumbling more and more, I with effort raise my head.
close, something I had just written: although I had been glowing with pleasure as I set out with my manuscript to see him, and he, too, had been eager, it was as if each of us scuttled away into a corner, farther and more apart than ever before, and I still have those stranger's eyes before me whenever, after reading aloud, stumbling more and more, I with effort raise my head.
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hus, with rare exceptions, I stopped taking others with me to places where for me, and, as I realized, for me alone, a new territory opened upâwhere my personal field of exploration lay.
hus, with rare exceptions, I stopped taking others with me to places where for me, and, as I realized, for me alone, a new territory opened upâwhere my personal field of exploration lay.
I even kept my forays, pushed farther every day, a secret from my family, as if they were a vice, something pointless, at the very least selfish, unworthy of an adult responsible for himself and his kin. If at home I was asked where I had been so long, I would lie, saying, for instance, that I had gone to a movie on the Right Bank, an unusually long one; had played billiards at the Place de Clichy, had crashed a reception at the Austrian embassy and drunk an entire bottle of wine, had got into an argument with a policeman in front of Les Invalides; with the woman from Catalonia I even used the lie that for professional reasons I had spent hours following an unknown beauty, a “worldly woman,” from the Pont Neuf to God knows where; I went so far as to lie to my son, unnecessarily and inexplicably, as I have often lied in my life, groundlessly, without enjoyment, simply because of being asked and having to open my mouth.
But for me that disappearing day in, day out into the suburbs was the first good habit I had acquired up to then. Here was finally a habit I could be happy about; never would I want to be rid of it.
The morning after a trip the first thing I did, under the pretext of going to the doctor's, was to plunge into the bushes on the far side of the Périphérique overpass and head for the wide-open spaces in the no-man's -land between Malakoff, Laplace, and Fontenay-aux-Roses. The first tree beyond the city limits, no matter how scrawny, rustled at me more tangibly than the more luxuriant exemplars of its species on the other side. Drinking coffee, more bitter than anywhere in the city, in one of the cavelike bars, I tasted a more penetrating reality, and the sight of
the old aqueduct stretching high above the Bievre Valley, not just one monument among many like the monumental structures of Paris, gave me a sense of monumentality different from that in the city, as did the similarly scattered churches in the region, often lower than their surroundings, also sunk deeper into the ground, as if forming part of the ruins behind them, where I regained possession of the past and of history, which in the course of my life had made me skittish, regained it for instance in the stone figures around the arched portal of the church in Bagneux, made easier to overlook by the fact that the devotees of progress who participated in various revolutions had thoroughly smashed their faces and limbs, leaving only a few curves of shoulders, heads, and toes: never again, was the message that came across to me from that scratching-out of eyes and smashing of skulls, would the perpetrators go back to the saints, whose stories had been told to the end. They had stood there as the idols of a power that had become illegitimate; this had to be hammered into the world with each blow.
the old aqueduct stretching high above the Bievre Valley, not just one monument among many like the monumental structures of Paris, gave me a sense of monumentality different from that in the city, as did the similarly scattered churches in the region, often lower than their surroundings, also sunk deeper into the ground, as if forming part of the ruins behind them, where I regained possession of the past and of history, which in the course of my life had made me skittish, regained it for instance in the stone figures around the arched portal of the church in Bagneux, made easier to overlook by the fact that the devotees of progress who participated in various revolutions had thoroughly smashed their faces and limbs, leaving only a few curves of shoulders, heads, and toes: never again, was the message that came across to me from that scratching-out of eyes and smashing of skulls, would the perpetrators go back to the saints, whose stories had been told to the end. They had stood there as the idols of a power that had become illegitimate; this had to be hammered into the world with each blow.
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was increasingly suffering in my metropolisâand it seemed to me it would have been even worse in New York, let alone in Romeâfrom something that had already menaced me in childhood, since my time in boarding school: from loss of place, or space deprivation. (The prophet of Porchefontaine, who originally, before he became an innkeeper, going from one bankruptcy to the next, in suburb after suburb, had been trained as a philosopher, uses the word “dereification.”) And my suffering was not improved by stays in the country, even in the most remote villages, which, after all, should have been familiar to me from childhood.
was increasingly suffering in my metropolisâand it seemed to me it would have been even worse in New York, let alone in Romeâfrom something that had already menaced me in childhood, since my time in boarding school: from loss of place, or space deprivation. (The prophet of Porchefontaine, who originally, before he became an innkeeper, going from one bankruptcy to the next, in suburb after suburb, had been trained as a philosopher, uses the word “dereification.”) And my suffering was not improved by stays in the country, even in the most remote villages, which, after all, should have been familiar to me from childhood.
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