Sphinx (6 page)

George and the Padre came to see me each in his turn while I was working. In that glassed-in booth, a visit felt like an invasion. We chatted, cramped together, our words masked by the music, obscured behind a wall of sound. They both noticed that I displayed a magnificent and unexpected gift for the task at hand. It was settled that until I found another job I would remain the resident DJ. The Padre couldn't help acting as a sort of moral guide—he had decided to view this adventure as an ablution, as a necessary submersion in the world of terrestrial passions. It was a type of trial, a confrontation with the excesses of evil designed to steel my character.

My memory of all this is broken, incomplete. All those nights ended up
melting into one, jerky and repetitive like the music I was distilling there in a state of extreme fatigue. I had never stuck with anything long enough to really immerse myself in it. Ennui was my curse and nothing was ever able to shake me out of it. The strangeness lurking beneath the surface of something could only last for so long. Everything quickly became a tainted repetition, void of all charm. Faced with this flesh I was trying to make move every night, I felt disgust, a brutal alternating between excitement and dejection, resulting in surrender to my essential melancholy. All I felt was contempt, such intense contempt! The numerous, innumerable bodies made up a monster of a hundred heads and tangled limbs whose only cohesion and life force came from the rhythmic impulse I dealt to it. The whole night, an absurd imperative commanded me to postpone the inevitable death and division of this collective body that I was making evolve before my eyes, from my glass booth shaking it with charges of sound and bombarding it with lightning. I thought about my work—admittedly mortal and ephemeral—with fear, the fear of a demiurge caught in the position of damned hero, who finds a brother in Sisyphus. The fear of God when He realizes, without having foreseen it, that His first act has now made Him a slave of continuous Creation. God cursing when He realizes that without His knowledge, He has been made the driving engine of the morbid embraces crossing this panicked body born of Him, of His sweat, of His strained efforts and His unarticulated cries. A dizzying disgust would take hold of me as I overcame the inertia of these separate bodies, still reluctant to come together.

However, I did experience nights of rapture that no human ecstasy can equal, those nights when, for some unknown reason, a sort of inspired fury seized the entire club. This trancelike state that I provoked and prolonged vibrated through my body and carried me to unimaginable excesses of delirium. One such night is still carved into my memory,
a Saturday in October—coincidentally also my birthday. The party lasted well beyond the usual timeframe. Strictly speaking, I was no longer listening to the music; it was passing through me. I was cuing up the records as if by instinct, my vision obscured by a veil of blood. I was in a coma agitated by rhythms that were more and more painfully arousing my desire without ever draining it. In a vague fog I discerned the compact mass of people dancing, flattened one against the other and yet swaying, lifted up in waves. United almost without fissure, they were probably incapable of moving, but the entire mass vibrated in rhythm, all individual drives undone and lost in a higher, sovereign need. George told me later that everyone who entered the club mixed gradually into this mob and that between the hours of two and six in the morning nobody left, the employees were overwhelmed. At eight in the morning, emptied, I collapsed onto a bench and went to sleep.

That night sealed my reputation. It still reigns supreme in my memory; no other night ever achieved such furious intensity. From then on they all seemed bland and nondescript. That night inflicted a violence upon me, an annihilation; I experienced what only sex at its extremes allows one to feel, infrequently and fleetingly. I had reached a limit, and after that came repetition and ennui.

I was guided by habit, or maybe addiction, as I left my house every night around midnight. I no longer slept at night; what had previously been a tendency of mine became a permanent mode of being. Anxiety would propel me into the streets and at nightfall, as if mechanically, I would get dressed to go out. The pallor of my complexion was heightened; in the light of day I looked like a corpse. Moreover, the sun's glare hurt my eyes, so I started to avoid it.

Even when I didn't have to serve as DJ at the Apocryphe, I would go out to other clubs where I was always let in because people recognized me.
I would check out half a dozen, ending up each morning in the club that stayed open the latest, frequented by a mostly black clientele. I dawdled in all the places that were in vogue at the time. My eclecticism pushed me to ignore differences and transgress against exclusions; I entered indiscriminately into clubs that were gay or straight, male or female. I didn't mind whether the place was a notorious dive or a hideaway of respectable sharks. By nature rather silent and reserved, whether from a sense of privacy or from my convictions, I had little to fear from these drunken late-night wanderings through this beautiful world abandoned to vice. The exquisite correctness of my manners, the benevolent moderation I flaunted in every place and in every circumstance, made it so that I was easily accepted: the Mafiosi propping up the bars would offer me cigars and pat me warmly on the shoulder; the groomed, bejeweled women adored the air of dreamy adolescence still floating around me. The contrast between my young age and the maturity legible in my serious features was comforting; they were sure of my discretion and that sufficed in this milieu. I didn't drink much, which was astonishing to them. They never once saw me drunk but from the start I made known my high tolerance for alcohol, which they viewed as a strength; once this had been proven, I was able to stop drinking altogether, and they only respected me the more. I pretended that I was victim to gentle vices, the better to conceal my real vices, which would have seemed scandalous. They affectionately mocked me for my intellectual aura. I had to have a fault; they focused on this one and neglected to notice the others. This magnified aura made me feared, which is to say hated, by certain people, but at the same time, the distance that my intellectual reputation established kept me from dangerous familiarities. I spoke little and listened a lot: the ideal role, as so many people are in perpetual search of an indulgent ear for their nighttime rants. The sum of the stories they confided in me could fill entire
volumes of sociological or ethnological reports. There was the tedious and nonsensical conversation of tipsy society men; the chatter vaguely colored with the philosophy and aestheticism of the washed-up who cling to a completely superficial and secondhand culture as a fiery temper clings to a menopausal
bourgeoise;
and, in passing, the virile and noxious conversations of old bachelors following the antics of their protégées out of the corner of their eyes—I was subjected to it all, and I listened with all the presence of mind that was still within my power in those hours of confusion.

What was I looking for there? A distraction from an imperceptible anguish? The response to a question I hadn't yet formulated? Evasion? Flight? I don't even know. But it became a game for me to go out like this. Entering a club or a bar was in a way like going to the cinema: a dark room with sounds and images in three dimensions (were there really three?). I lived on the film set of an enormous stock of unrealized B-movies of a hitherto unseen genre. At the hour when the television programs come to an end, when the last spectators leave from the theaters and the marquees are taken down, a different vision appears, a variation each night on the same miserable and violent scenario.

II

My new lifestyle wasn't immediately upended by meeting A***. I merely added a preliminary stop to my nights—an obligatory visit to the Eden. However, my fascination, quickly transforming into passion, soon required more. To satisfy it, I had to start making more than one daily courtesy call.

A*** loved going out to clubs once the show at the Eden was over. Soon after, some of the other dancers from the Eden, dragged in A***'s wake, would show up at the Apocryphe. They did me the honor of dancing to the music I played and their performance gave me a new enthusiasm for my work. At certain moments throughout the night A*** would come keep me company in my glass booth, dancing until the surroundings were eclipsed, leaning in to say something to me with an accent I found irresistible. A***'s spirit, like A***'s dance, was infused with a crafty and charming naïveté.

Soon we became rather close; we would call each other almost every day when we woke up and would eat dinner together at least once a week, just the two of us, after which I would allow myself to escort A*** to the Eden. We would meet again at the Apocryphe, and would often go loiter somewhere else after closing. This strange intimacy didn't stem from any common social or intellectual interests; it wasn't the sign or effect of a close friendship or romantic relationship. I wasn't particularly enthralled by the originality of A***'s views, or by a similarity in our tastes; we neither combated nor conversed. Our time together and our
conversation were simply a pleasure, like the contemplation of A***'s body or A***'s dance, an aesthetic pleasure that I could attribute only to a lightness of being that never dipped into inanity. I can't define A*** as being anything other than both frivolous and serious, residing in the subtle dimension of presence without insistence.

Our arrival together at every locale and the attention we paid to each other started to incite gossip. Our encounters, which took place only in public, aroused suspicions of a private affair that, at the time, didn't exist. At the Apocryphe and everywhere we went, people made remarks about our striking dissimilarity. They teased me over the contrast in color between our skins, they stressed the difference in our mannerisms: the impulsiveness of A***'s voice and gestures, that wild exuberance and openness to the world, which by comparison underscored my moderation and reserve. A*** in turn had to bear the incessant prattle about my religious and social background. They painted a picture of my incomprehensible oddities: my isolation; my taste for solitude strangely coexisting with a sudden dive into this world; an unheralded abandon of a university career for the improvised post of DJ. For want of any intelligible coherence, they assumed I must have been harboring some kind of vice or perversion.

What did I get out of spending all my time with someone with whom I shared no social, intellectual, or racial community? That was precisely the question troubling them. Black skin, white skin: our looks were against us. Our intimacy went against the mandate dictating that birds of a feather flock together. And this impossible clash of colors produced the general opinion that this was an unnatural union.

In order to stop the scandal, we diluted our dissimilarity by always hanging out in a group. But the people in this crowd tried to detach me from A*** by attempting to convince me that we were fundamentally
incompatible. I couldn't care less that my attachment to my seemingly perfect antithesis was provoking worry and alarm. They complained of A***'s numerous affairs, highlighted A***'s notorious fickleness and capriciousness that would make any real attachment impossible. They charitably forewarned me that I wasn't A***'s “type,” that we weren't even of the same species. That if my intention was to turn this friendship into something more, it was best to give up now, and that if, by some misfortune, it had already become something more, it was just as well to break it off now before it dissolved into unpleasantries and pain.

I thoroughly did not care about their opinions, their advice and warnings, their slanders and denigrations. I was well aware of A***'s fickleness, capriciousness, and quickly changing tastes, for I had witnessed all of these traits myself. As for this concert of well-intentioned deceit and charitable denunciations aimed at discouraging me, I was deaf to it all.