Zone (33 page)

it was very good, but
. . .
Lebihan maybe, between oysters and bicycle races, or Maurice Bardèche himself the old fascist will say to me
you did well, but
. . .
maybe Ezra Pound the radio commentator of Mussolini’s Italy will walk out of the shadows to murmur
it was perfect, but
. . .
or Tihomir Blaškić the colonel of Vitez will leave his Bosnian retreat to shout to me
vrlo zanimljivo, ali se
. . .
Marianne will take her five children by the hand they’ll all wait for me on a train station platform to give me a kick in my privates saying
you can do better
, and Stéphanie the tall sorrowful one will look at me like an angel announcing the end of the world I’ll understand that I could have been better, I know I didn’t measure up, men fall in esteem, ghosts please be understanding it’s the end of days Francis is tired, he is laboring beneath his burden, understand, you who are all very Christian and believe in the bearded man with the heavy cross, take into consideration the pain of Francis the suitcase-carrier huddled in his first-class seat, crushed by alcohol fatigue amphetamines the dead and the living as if he could no longer stop his brain his thoughts the dark landscape rushing by and the specters who nibble at his feet, look there’s the moon, we’ve pierced the clouds the planet is in the middle of the window, it’s shedding light on central Italy somewhere around San Giovanni Valdarno, Saint John on the Arno city of the beheaded Baptist, halfway between Florence and Arezzo, in two hours I’ll be in Rome, the hardest part is over, I pick up the book on the tray, Rafael Kahla was born in Lebanon in 1940, says the back cover, and lives today between Tangier and Beirut, strange phrase, between Tangier and Beirut there is Ceuta Oran Algiers Tunis Tripoli Benghazi Alexandria Port Said Jaffa Acre Tyre and Sidon, or else Valencia Barcelona Marseille Genoa Venice Dubrovnik Durres Athens Salonika Constantinople Antalya and Lattakiyah, or else Palma Cagliari Syracuse Heraklion and Larnaka if you count the islands, Tangier guardian of the lower lip of the Zone, so Rafael Kahla the Lebanese writer resides partially in the westernmost branch of his Phoenician ancestors, Carthaginian Tingis today an ocher and white city capital of illegal emigration of tourism and contraband, with the port full of Africans hoping for an unlikely departure for nearby Spain, I picture Rafael Kahla living in the Medina, in one of those traditional houses with a central courtyard whose rooftop terraces have a magnificent view over the bay, one of those houses where William Burroughs settled at the end of 1953, he was coming from Rome, he was coming from South America where he had sought out the
yage
of the seers and telepaths, he was coming from Mexico where he had killed his wife Joan with a bullet in the head, he was coming from New York where he had fallen in love with Allen Ginsberg who had sent him packing, Rome bored him to death, too many statues, not enough beautiful boys, not enough drugs or freedom,
Rome that died crawling of an eye disease
he would write, Burroughs prophet of psychotropic drugs would survive Kerouac Cassady Ginsberg and his own son Billy Burroughs the drunkard, he would survive morphine heroine LSD mushrooms and would die at the venerable age of eighty-three—in Tangier he settled into a
pension
that served as a brothel for homosexual Europeans, he liked this rat-filled hole, the hashish is cheap the Riffian catamites very young whom poverty propels into Western arms, William Burroughs writes
Interzone
and
Naked Lunch
in four years of marijuana opiates alcohol and male prostitutes, he loves the countryless city of international trade, nest of spies arms traffickers and drugs, the gate to the Zone inspires him, William became a writer because he killed his wife, drunk, in a bar in Mexico playing at William Tell with a glass, one bullet right in the middle of the forehead this vision haunts him the red stain the head tilting back the blood trickling from the open skull the life escaping, Lowry the drunkard almost strangled his wife many times—why did Rafael Kahla the Lebanese author become a writer, maybe for the same violent reason, I picture him fighting during the war in Beirut, who knows, he killed a comrade by mistake or savagely massacred some civilians, just as Eduardo Rózsa the Hungarian volunteer in Croatia great killer of Serbs might have had the two journalists he took for spies killed before he embarked on writing autobiography, Burroughs the visionary sees his dead wife again, in Tangier, he talks to her at night, he even thinks of her when the little Arabs are licking the wounds of his soul, he thinks of Joan dead and especially in the city that doesn’t exist exotic drifting somewhere between the Atlantic and the Black Sea, at the Café de France, at the Café Tangis where the service is fast and fresh says the handwritten sign Burroughs soars between two worlds like a vulture over the Sonoran desert, in Tangier the White sullied by time, among the
dings
of his typewriter carriage and the sighs of all the paying coituses in the neighboring rooms—in Venice between two worlds in a city adrift lost in history I didn’t write, I drank I walked I read dragging my dead behind me just as Burroughs did his, I read histories of ghosts that suited me nicely, I had chosen Venice because I hadn’t been able to go there with Vlaho and Andi, too far, too expensive, our Adriatic expedition had stopped in Trieste the Habsburgian, I left Zagreb in a bus for Venice with my khaki canvas gear I checked into a hotel in Cannaregio I remember it had been so long since I’d taken out my credit card that it was stuck to the billfold and had little greenish spots on the back the receptionist took it with an air of disgust I felt as if I stank of war I must have stunk of war grease guns humidity tobacco green knapsacks my hair so short my eyes wide-open and red I was thinking of staying for two days in Venice and taking the nighttime Marco Polo to Paris finding Marianne again with the white breasts and something fell on me I didn’t have the strength, stuck between two worlds I paced up and down the city at night the city of great silence fog and plague, I found the apartment in the Ghetto by chance passing by a real estate agency in San Polo I left the hotel bought a telephone card called Marianne one freezing-cold evening from a nearby booth I spoke to Marianne but I wasn’t speaking to her I was looking at the boats and dinghies moored in the tiny canal two meters from the public telephone, I said to myself I’m going to stay here for a little while I think, she answered I’ll come if you like why not I wanted her to come and warmed by her voice I went back to wrap myself up in my Oriental rug and stare at the ceiling—what saved me from drowning in Venice, I don’t know, Marianne maybe, or Ghassan, or myself, the ghost of Andrija who lived inside me, his fury, if I had had an ounce of willpower or culture I could maybe have written like Burroughs in Tangier but I was quite incapable of it, I was incapable of anything it was Marianne who called my parents to tell them I was doing well that I was resting in Venice, I was resting, I drank my meager accumulated reserves and my Parisian savings and took my last amphetamines, I didn’t have any creative drugs, drugs were for being able to walk for hours, at night, to sleep little, like on the front, to be on the alert but this time for nothing, to tremble when a stranger appeared out of the fog, to mount nocturnal ambushes against specters, drunk and drugged I hugged the walls of buildings walked like a hunted man an imaginary rifle in my hand, I glanced every which way at corners before crossing at a run, bent low as if an elite sniper had me in his sights from a window in the Guardi palazzo, I caught my breath with my back to the wall before throwing a fictive grenade into the blind spot, my heart was pounding 180 beats a minute I am in the heat of battle in the noisy silence of the lagoon, I set a deadly trap for the Vaporetto No. 1 the only one to go up the Grand Canal at night, I wait for it with an anti-tank grenade launcher at the end of an alley near the Academy drunk crazed I aim at the small lights dancing over the dark water I shoot I imagine the line of fire whistling reaching the craft exploding illuminating the façades of the palaces and churches I picture the explosion the heatwave makes me close my eyes I got it I got it I sank an enemy vessel the American tourists are sinking into the darkness to join the rats what joy I light a cigarette and go back to haunt the streets always playing at soldier and doing this for hours for entire nights obsessed with my memories, and it’s easy, in the Venetian half-light, to live out your nightmares in solitude, for there’s nothing living around, aside from the dead shadows of the fog and the cries of the foghorn, when she arrived Marianne said to me I feel as if you’re returning from very far away, yes I’m returning from afar, I was incapable of sleeping with her I still had the contact of prostitutes on my skin of raped Muslims of corpses I was no longer inside myself I was in the Bardo the waiting room of wandering souls and little by little the more I drank with Ghassan the more I found a physical position in the nighttime world a new being I felt as if I were finding my footing again as if I were walking a little on the water of the lagoon that sort of illusion and the more I thought I was recovering a new body the more I wanted to try it out on Marianne’s who was sinking into depression as she prepared for her teacher’s exam getting up early working all day running for half an hour every afternoon at six o’clock sharp at the Zattere she never felt like making love, while I was returning to life, my specter’s sex stood straight up like a cypress in a cemetery, I was emptying Marianne of her desire her vitality and her money too, I was pumping her dry, I was exhausting her as I drew her to the bottom along with me, when I went out at night for my nocturnal insomniac walks until I found Ghassan she would ask me to keep her company in the humid silence of the Ghetto, I stayed whispering maybe, yes, why not, playfully, and sometimes she was so desperate with solitude that she gave in, her legs spread, all dry, I hurt her and panted coarsely on her shoulder and she didn’t move an inch, resigned, her eyes closed, the ejaculation plunged us immediately into sadness I was ashamed of having forced her and she, she understood that I was going to leave her alone anyway once desire was satisfied in order to escape the shame and avoid her gaze I sneaked away as she pretended to be asleep, in the stairway my balls empty I tugged the black hat on my head, overcome with cold I ran to warm myself up always in the same direction, towards the Quay of Oblivion the bars of Aldo, Muaffaq the Syrian or the Paradise Lost, I crossed the deserted main square of the Ghetto, in Venice everything closed early, an anti-noise rule of the phantom city—dying cities begin by regulating their agony by advancing the closing hours of establishments in distress incrementally, until they’re converted into tearooms with a special permission to stay open until midnight, the dream of mayors justly elected by old cows in furs who’ve already gone to bed by happy hour, ridding the most silent city in the world of the last sounds of life: the tourists go to bed early, the tourists’ feet are killing them and they go back to the hotel quickly to throw their last strength into lovemaking, before sleeping the sleep of the just, rocked by the soft lapping of the Grand Canal on the pilings and docks, for it will not be said that they never fornicated in the capital of gondolas and romanticism, they forget that romanticism was an illness of death, a kind of black plague of sentiment and madness, they forget that
it’s so romantic
actually means
it’s terribly morbid
, Marianne felt it, even though she wasn’t consumptive like the Lady of the Camellias, but subject to the assaults of a more or less violent, more or less drunk ex-warrior, who roughly resembled all the clichés of complete male chauvinism, and still today in this train that’s three-quarters empty I have the sensation of a failure an unforgivable violence like with Stéphanie almost ten years later—close your eyes Francis I squeeze out a tear of rage impossible to forget impossible even in sleep maybe Burroughs in Tangier was in a similar state, beside himself, fighting the black beast of memory and shame the owl with the spider’s feet stuck in a corner of memory, like Marianne Stéphanie the brunette with the long hair the expert in the geopolitics of the Zone is stuck to my personal ceiling like an insect, too many things there are too many things everything is too heavy even a train won’t manage to carry these memories to Rome they weigh so much, they weigh more than all the executioners and victims in the briefcase over my seat, that collection of ghosts begun with Harmen Gerbens the old Cairo-dweller, Harmen Gerbens with the sad mustache imprisoned in Qanater in Cairo, strange fate, escaping the Dutch police to end up locked up in Egypt, you’d have to be Saint Christopher to bear all that, the forty-three photos of Gerbens and his pages of commentaries in his journal, Gerbens the rapist documentary-maker great director of concentration-camp pornography, in the beginning I didn’t know why I was recovering this information these names and photos right and left, in the immense files at the Agency, at first, then farther and farther away, why does one do things not out of the wish to know, not out of a need to understand, to conquer a place in the world that’s becoming undone, Burroughs in Tangier was fighting against his own violence with opiates alcohol and kif, like Malcolm Lowry with firewater, Tangier a drifting city a city of grand illusions and contraband, lost alone on the thick lower lip of the Zone, William Burroughs is American, he misses the banks of the Mississippi, the well-ordered avenues of New York, the palm trees of Palm Beach, he is elsewhere, that night in October 1955, he isn’t sleeping, he isn’t writing he isn’t reading he’s sitting on a wooden chair his eyes lost in the darkness, outside or inside, he’s smoking a joint of hashish paste, the window is open it’s still nice out despite the fall, William is forty-one, the age of man’s estate, behind him beyond the badly whitewashed wall he hears groaning, someone groans, two seconds, three, stops and starts again, a rather slow, calm rhythm, a man is groaning with his mouth closed Burroughs breathes in his smoke, his hearing so strained that he feels as if he’s a bat flitting around in the next room, his ears so wide open that he hears the groaning man’s clenched teeth grating, Burroughs feels very clearly the base of his scrotum contract, the more he listens the more his sex swells, what happiness, he unbuckles his pants to let his tool loose, in the open air in the grey smoke-rings, he breathes on his penis, he watches the member’s single eye snatch up the marijuana, the tiny lip of that carp-mouth open to smoke in turn and become bigger and bigger, he observes his penis hardening to the rhythm of the man’s moans in the next room, curious, interested then fascinated by the blue veins running through his own flesh, William puts the joint down for a minute to take hold of the plastic bag on the table, he is in darkness, he can concentrate on the groans that continue, faster, stronger, in the neighboring room, beyond the noise of the plastic which is stuck to his mouth, his nostrils, he has trouble breathing, the more he breathes in the less air reaches his lungs, his head completely covered by the bag, his hand contracts over the burning flesh between his legs, he begins to groan too and the more he moans the more air he lacks the more air he lacks the more he jerks his huge organ his ears are buzzing he’s very hot he sees red soft strong bodies pressing against him Burroughs is completely inside himself and outside himself the bat has become a flying beetle he rubs harder breathes violently his saliva slips onto the bag he is with Joan the androgynous he is with Joan the dead androgyne it’s she who takes him she buries two fingers into his throat and two others into his anus he feels sick his glottis contracts he is asphyxiated he crushes his prick like a fish it spurts empties out explodes, Burroughs explodes almost fainting his semen flies into the night the viscosity floats for an instant like the orgasm he cannot cry out he cannot cry out he’s going to die his eardrums are ringing he flails his arms and legs he is drowning the sperm falls onto his thighs the instant he rips the bag off breathes in breathes in breathes in he comes a second time as he opens his eyes the misshapen room sways around him in the sonorous silence of Tangier, completely collapsed in his chair Burroughs gulps in air, gulps in air, gulps in air, far away, his heart flown away, in complete, soft, relaxed wellbeing, smiling he observes a globular drop a white filament hanging from his finger, he looks at it for a long time before licking his finger curiously and lighting up the joint again, the smoke burns his irritated mucus membranes, completely relaxed, the grocery bag on the floor now, Burroughs feels the reed fibers of the chair bruising his ass, he is thirsty, he downs his beer in one draught, does a poem come to him, does a fragment from