Sphinx (13 page)

It felt as if I had never been permitted such transparency with anyone—anyone but A***. Had I confided more in A*** than in anybody else? What had I revealed? Had I unmasked myself, or at least what I thought I knew of myself? No, more likely I had exposed my own collapse, the ruin of the edifice I had so painfully constructed out of rhetoric and made to stand in for an identity. I was forcing myself to forget this nudity. My soul was not retreating behind a multitude of appearances that it could have incarnated endlessly, but rather, hollowed from the inside, was being instilled with doubt over this cavity that it hadn't filled with anything. I was then forced to recognize what I had always secretly wanted others to discover: “I” is nothing. It was a painful triumph when, faced with this beloved being, I finally achieved what I had always been aiming toward: the ability to confess my own weakness, my nothingness. But the weight of this nothingness was revealed only to me; it remained unintelligible to A***, and I remained in the barrenness, the ruin, at last revealed as if by accident, following this confrontation with my own nudity and death. “What am I,” I was asking myself, “other than what you do not know how to say about me?”

Even when I was embracing this body, I suffered as if I had never held it in my arms, caught up in a love that was always uncompleting itself. Returning home one night, I found a T-shirt that belonged to A*** on the sofa in the living room left out from the night before; I searched in
it for A***'s scent, for a trace that had not yet vanished. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to a hopeless sweetness, head buried in the cloth as if it were a shroud, as if I were never to see A*** again. I constantly felt as though this body was lingering just out of reach, even when I was holding it in my arms. All I was ever embracing was the hopelessness of not being able to embrace; I was embracing an absence whose scent alone was penetrating me, breathed in from the folds of a T-shirt that had been forgotten and left on a sofa overnight.

I was blind, giving myself without a word, without a sign, existing as mere body heat. In my state of confusion I suddenly lost touch with reality. I was culpable, infinitely culpable for not having seen, for having been able not to see, for having sought a refuge that was too distant, inaccessible. Ever since, by achieving the coveted, powerful mastery of an indecent outward display of emotions, each more false and bitter than the next, I have fallen from betrayal into disgust, searching vainly for this love whose murder I never cease to expiate. What can I do, what can I give to escape from this morbid ennui, from the horrible clutches of this desire to embrace, from the stinging of tears I never managed to shed and from the hopelessness that seizes me so incessantly even while I seem to triumph. I travel; my work on the apophatic tradition has earned me some recognition within academia. They desire me, admire me, respect me…But of all those who will lament my death, how many will lament my life? The torture I endure from my inner thoughts plays out in a ridiculous drama—a tragedy of passion! How I love to mock myself. But I ridicule that which comes mortally to besiege me at those hours when I am unmasked, faced with my own abyss. I was remembering that face, the color of the air that winter day when we made love for the final time, not knowing that the bliss we were sharing then would be our last.

Since then, I have been able to discern only a carnal and obscene
root at the core of all my relationships, which horrifies me. A***'s death caused me to unlearn sensual pleasure; I became caught up in carnal affairs, and I was tortured by the indignity of it all. Thenceforth, flesh became obscene to me. To clutch someone in my arms took on, without fail, a singular sense of indignity, the taste of putrefaction. When I embrace someone I am submerged in a feeling of infamy, in the nauseating sensation of having an orgasm in a charnel house, among the noxious fumes of decomposing flesh. I am revolted by flesh, but this revulsion, failing to deaden the assaults of my libido, merely infects them with a cadaverous terror.

I exist in a morbid state, my body riddled by consumption, not knowing from where to vomit up the soul it has created. For all I have done since A***'s death is forge myself a soul, and I no longer know if I should deny its existence. When I close my eyes, I see my soul as a screen crisscrossed with flowing, intertwined lines; architectural straight lines of a volume uncertain of its limits, exposed on all sides; a fragile construction, by turns knocked down, invaded, uprooted, robbed of its foundations, mined by all those embraces in which it happily prostitutes itself. Gazes, hands, all that is outside comes to burn it, shake it…But I would like to drown out the noise of this tearing of silk that happens between physical bodies and mental architecture. I am assailed by indifference. I had thought that I would never be able to grow tired of loving, but one night I woke to an absence of love and felt no torture: it was the absence of this torture that truly scared me, that tortured me.

I even regret the suffering that I felt. One morning at the Apocryphe, the night unraveling with no end in sight, I remember suffering from the feeling of being unfulfilled, from the incompleteness which was only continuing to grow between A*** and me. Noticing a sequin sparkling under A***'s eye, I imagined it was a tear, while I watched those lips murmuring the words of the Edith Piaf song that A*** had asked me to play so often: “La Ville Inconnue.” My aptitude for suffering astonished me in that moment. I was suffering as no one suffers anymore in this century; my sensibility was outmoded in the extreme. Had I ever been capable of loving without suffering? And what was I suffering from, exactly? I would wait for nights on end, hoping that A*** would come and join me. I often despaired, staring at a watch that was engraving a revolting revelation on my living flesh. I would contort with pain on the rug; I loved more than I was loved, desired more than I was desired. My pride forbade me from admitting this suffering to A***. Or, more likely, my silence was the effect of a profound indifference. Perhaps I had only ever delighted in my own suffering, which I considered the purification of passions that, deep down, I judged as absurd.

Still dancing before my eyes are shooting stars, the dead embers of cigarettes, the firebrand of hasty breaths that interposed themselves between my hand and the surface of this body, tempting me like a demon, vanishing, encircling in its hand a pact signed with blood. Nothing but spilt
blood between us, ever since the first day of our love; the day before, A*** had been cutting my hair and had inadvertently slashed the top of my ear with the scissors. I see A***'s face once more, ashamed and amused, in a hurry to grab cotton and alcohol to disinfect the cut that was bleeding onto my face. So much blood—it could only have finished in blood: this horrifying idea suddenly crossed my mind and I didn't know how to get rid of it. Blood continued to spurt, our love continued to pass through bloody fulgurations. Each time I could only say to myself with fright that it would finish in blood, whether mine or A***'s I hadn't decided. The violent, perhaps bloody, death of our love. I laughed one day thinking of my blood type: universal donor, O negative. I liked placing myself in universal negation, as a virus that had the power to spread in anyone without exception, a carrier of negativity. What a metaphor! It was thus that I was trying to escape from imagining this end that I wish I had never been capable of prophesying.

My memory tends toward its own eradication—my death—because I can no longer bear that I live, ever since that day when life appeared to me as a narrative, when I understood at last that by living this love, all I had been doing was enacting my cultural determinism. I had fulfilled the New Testament of this archaic, enormous Bible that had nourished my being. The Word was incarnating itself in death; the ancient prophecy was coming to fruition.

I suffered from not ever experiencing what is called “possession,” and I doubtless owe this suffering to an enigmatic narrative that robbed me of myself. What I had wanted to possess, dead and inaccessible or perhaps even a purely abstract figure, condemned me to wander aimlessly from object of lust to object of love. Not asking them to be for me what I would have wanted to be for them, I lived in that most painful inequality of sentiments. I loved, but in full dispossession, haunted by betrayal.
I suffered from learning my nothingness, but, in trying to forget it, I took up and then successively abandoned all social simulacra. And I never suspected that the bottom of this hell was anywhere other than in myself, in an old biblical propensity for stories and for the infinite echo of the Word in search of its incarnations. I explain thus these waves of unintelligible and unfounded hopelessness, assailing me even while my mind was focused elsewhere, even as I was mechanically stringing together rehearsed gestures and thoughts. I was losing something of myself in an abyss of uncertainty. I was always attempting to take on a heavy burden of work in order to keep from being swallowed up by ennui, this first obsessive fear that nothing has ever managed to exorcise. Back then my strategy was to lose myself in order to find myself, which today I understand to be a mysticism; however, I had been deluding myself for so long that once I finally came to that realization, my life had already dissolved into waiting vainly for a death that was equally vain.

IV

Following A***'s death, I disavowed my job as DJ, just as my renown and reputation were beginning to grow. I was the object of ever more abundant solicitations which I evaded brutally. I was feeling the imperious need to break with all that had borne witness to the appearance and disappearance of the love I was mourning.

I handed in my resignation to George, who had no choice but to accept it. Initially I cloistered myself at home where I felt the painful lack of A***'s presence. I was trying to forget the void that had come to reside there, to escape from the proof of this absence through an unremitting stream of intellectual labor. But too often I would interrupt myself to think again and again about what I had lost. The thought pursued me, and my work was only able to hide me from it imperfectly; I was always slipping, the force keeping me from it was never sufficient. I would wander around the apartment aimlessly from room to room, recognizing here and there a trace, a sign, from the period of my life I had spent with A***.

Then I roamed, traveled for a few years, giving lectures in universities abroad to a select and very specialized audience. I was fleeing the incursions of my memory by constantly uprooting myself, always running, so much did I fear the moments when a prolonged hiatus let gather the points of reference I was trying to dissolve, when a spatial and temporal frame was able to reconstitute itself, bringing me back to the obsessive memory of this love. I was haunted by the possibility of settling into
a place long enough for time's passing to become tangible.

I kept my apartment, which remained uninhabited except when I took brief trips back to Paris. I was living in part off of my intellectual activities, in part off of the fortune I had inherited from my grandmother. I became a strange sort of professor, attached three months to one university, spending the next six months as a visiting professor in another, going wherever I was welcome for a temporary title. In my suitcase I was always lugging around an essay I had been working on for three years, which an editor, in the city I was staying in at the time, had agreed to publish.

I had correspondents spread almost everywhere, and nowhere was I interested in having friends or lovers; my melancholy was rendering me more somber and taciturn than ever, and as a result I was repelling all sentiments other than esteem or indifference.

Returning to Paris after a week in Amsterdam, I found a letter from one of A***'s cousins, whom I had met during my first trip to New York. His letter, mailed a week earlier, was to inform me that A***'s mother was sick. Standing in the middle of my study, considering the letter I held between my fingers, I recalled that old woman whom I knew hardly at all. The thought of her distant solitude, lost in that cruel, cold city, choked me with remorse. I couldn't recollect her face, or anything else of her. Nothing. Except the surroundings: those streets, the avenues with the wind chasing around old newspapers; a nighttime vision of dilapidated facades in the deranged neon lights and lonely pedestrians swept along by the breeze. This city was a film noir before my eyes, mute in the silence of my apartment. I remained immobile for a long time, confronted with this unmoving vision.

In the morning, without having packed a suitcase, I took the first plane for New York. While my gaze was floating above the voluptuous mass of cumuli we had torn through while gaining altitude, I was haunted by the thought of this woman. I was thinking of her reclusive life surrounded by memories of the life that had abandoned her again and again. What I knew of her, what A*** had mentioned in passing in our conversations—seven years ago already—was coming back to me in fragments, little by little recomposing the details of her existence. There was a portrait of her as a young woman in a pink stole, painted after the war; I recalled her
scandalous marriage with a bourgeois white man, the child (A***), the desertion and subsequent divorce that resulted in the child's fugues and eventual flight to Europe, only to return all too rarely. She kept the photographs of this devastated past in the drawer of a green, wooden writing desk. Did she ever look at them? I think she forced herself to forget, not to look, living between her bed, her somber work, and her kitchen where she made do with reheating the meals she no longer had the willpower to prepare for herself. When I knew her, already I perceived that she was exhausted with living, that she was carrying an intense lassitude inside of her, almost with arrogance.