©Kristine Harley No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without written permission from the author.
We ended up in Louis’s small, grimy apartment somewhere on the rue Blomet, in a seedy little quarter far from the fashionable districts. Louis gave Roger no money but shared with us bread, cheese, and wine, and allowed us to play with his canvas and paints. While stuffing ourselves and passing around the wine bottle we collaborated on a painting, each of us taking his turn to add a dab of color to what was supposed to be a collective landscape. Louis and I finally collapsed with laughter as Roger staggered drunkenly up to the canvas and swiped at it with a brush, missing it entirely. “Now, wait a minute, wait,” he protested, turning to us with outstretched hands and Louis and I quieted, only to collapse again as Roger prodded the canvas with his brush and sent it crashing to the floor.
Louis set the painting back on its easel and impulsively I pressed a piece of cheese into the oils. It stuck. Roaring with laughter, we broke off hunks of bread and found pins and bits of cloth and tried to stick them on as well, falling into suspenseful silence as each new piece was added, then bursting in to guffaws if it fell and applause if it stayed. Louis managed, after slathering on more of his expensive oils, to get a piece of a broken saucer to stay. I threw a glassful of wine at the canvas and we stood back to admire our dripping masterpiece. “The Last Supper!” Roger christened it, digging me in the ribs with his elbow. Falling into our chairs, we laughed until it was painful.
There was a knock at the door. Wiping his face, Louis rose to answer it and was startled to see a strange young woman, very attractive, very fashionably dressed, at the door. “Why—hello,” Louis stammered.
“Hello!” Roger chimed, climbing to his feet.
The woman stood and looked at us for a moment without saying anything, her gloved hands clasping a white beaded purse in front of her. Her dark eyes took in our dishevelment, the food on the table, Louis’s finished paintings that were stacked against the walls, and finally came to rest on the dripping canvas with pieces of food splattered on and around it. Her lips parted in amazement; then she, cool and regal in her long white dress, studied us. Under her inquisitive gaze we shifted sheepishly. Finally she turned back to Louis. “Must you,” she asked in a clear, soft voice, “scream like a bunch of savages? I could hear you outside as I was coming home.”
“Oh, God. We’re sorry,” Louis said.
“Yes, we’re barbarians,” Roger added, leaping forward to pull out a chair. “Do come in!”
Louis ran a hand through his crimped hair, gazing at the woman in shy admiration. “We lost track of the time, I guess.”
Roger, indicating the chair, asked, “Would you like some wine?”
She stared at us another moment, then casually walked in, passing Louis, then passing Roger and the chair and me, and going right up to our creation. She stopped just outside the circle of refuse on the floor to examine the canvas carefully. We grinned as she turned to address Louis. “Your work?”
“Sort of a collaborative effort,” he returned haltingly. Roger gave him a look of encouragement.
At that, she finally smiled. She had a beautiful smile, framed by her wavy short hair. “And—ah—” she asked, pointing with her toe at a big piece of paint-spattered cheese on the floor, “what exactly is the work? Just what is on the canvas or does it extend to the floor as well? Will you painstakingly catalogue each piece of soggy bread so you can recreate the effect exactly when it’s displayed in a gallery?”
Louis was having a hard time finding his tongue. “Well, it’s not so much a work of art—”
“More of a theatre piece, a one-act play,” I said, and that made everyone laugh. Over the woman’s shoulder Roger saluted me.
Holding her skirt up from the puddled wine on the floor, the woman walked up to me. “Believe it or not, I was coming home from the Comedie Française when I heard you. Your performance appears to have been more...avant garde.” She set her purse on the table.
“Had I known we were neighbors, I would have invited you,” Louis said. He glanced at me. “I suppose we could repeat—”
The woman shook her head, making her bobbed hair bounce. “No, thank you! But I would love some wine. My name’s Justine. Only Justine,” she added. We introduced ourselves, and Roger brightened as she sat in the chair he still held out for her.
“Give us a chance, mademoiselle; we can be gentlemen,” he beamed.
Justine smiled ruefully at him. She was extremely striking; a woman had to have perfect features to wear her hair in straight bangs and a simple bob as she did. As she slipped off her gloves her gaze settled on me and I smiled uncertainly, feeling suddenly timid. “I was rather attracted to the idea of savages,” she replied. “I’ve just spent a very tedious evening with these friends of the family that my mother sends to ambush me every month, and take me to dinner and the theatre—in other words, to keep an eye on me. God, I am so sick of the Comedie Française!” Louis filled some glasses from a new bottle, and Justine continued, “I’m sick of the opera, of Racine, of ballet, literature, polite chatter, good taste—and most of all, I’m sick of gentlemen.”
“To savagery, then!” Roger shouted, and we raised our glasses. “To idiots, barbarians, thieves—”
“Freeloaders,” Louis put in, nodding at Roger.
Roger raised his glass to Louis. “To gluttons and libertines and illegal immigrants—”
“Whores and concubines,” Justine added in her flawless French.
“To false prophets, hypocrites, and tax collectors,” I offered, mangling the language.
“To the untalented!” Roger offered.
“To the stupid!” riposted Justine.
“To ugliness and imbecility, everywhere!” Louis yelled, and we drank. Then Justine giggled as the three of us ran to splatter the remaining wine on our canvas. More food fell off, and when the piece of crockery hit the floor and broke, she clapped her hands. “The theatre lives!” she shrieked, applauding. “Down with the Comedie Française, and up with paganism and decadence!” We burst into cheers that were suddenly cut short by a loud thumping on the floor from below.
“Let’s get out of here,” Louis said in a low voice, and grabbed his coat from the floor. A man’s angry growl, unintelligible, jabbered something at us between the thuds, of which I only made out: “Third time this week! And if you don’t—” We ran out of the apartment and down three spiraling flights to the front door. On the sidewalk outside we paused to catch our breaths, and that man was still yelling at us from somewhere inside. When Louis cautiously opened the front door again, we heard the man’s choice of words very clearly along with the sound of shoes ringing down the iron stairs. Louis swore, then caught himself and let the door swing shut, glancing apologetically at Justine.
In disgust, Justine was struggling to yank her gloves back on while trying to hold both her purse and her cloak mashed against her waist with one elbow. “He’s making more goddamn noise than we did!” she said. I took her cloak from her before she could drop it. “And now I can’t go up to my apartment.”
“Do you live near that tenant?” Louis asked her.
Her gloves finally on, Justine took her cloak from me and whipped it around her shoulders. “Indeed I do! Believe me, I maintain a wide berth. He’s in the wrong neighborhood if he wants pastoral quiet.”
We retreated into the shadows of the street just in time to avoid being hit by the empty metal pan that was thrown out the door. It hit the sidewalk with a hollow clang. “You could kill somebody with that!” Louis yelled back, and received another string of oaths from the man before the door shut.
Roger said to Louis, “I hope we haven’t gotten you into trouble.”
Louis shook his head. “Forget it. Tomorrow he’ll drink himself into a stupor and forget his own name.” Justine was nodding. “I do wish he wouldn’t be sober at midnight, though,” Louis added. “Let’s go someplace else to make idiots of ourselves. I know where!” He led us down the sidewalk and in the growing darkness I offered Justine my arm. She slipped her hand into my elbow and walked absently beside me, gliding with an automatic grace, placing one foot directly in front of the other as if she’d been coached for an appearance at the royal court. The few street lamps let out dim cones of light; insects looped crazily in them. We passed progressively shabbier buildings, cheap hotels and bars with patrons leaning out of windows and yelling amiably to each other. Justine glowed like a birch tree in moonlight in her white dress.
“You know, Geoff, if you really hate the idea of living with your folks,” Roger commented, “you could get a place of your own, around here. You’d have plenty of company. We’re all trying to escape our families.”
“That’s for sure,” murmured Justine.
I mulled this over as we passed a small, squalid bar that was positively thundering with the layered percussion of drums, and bells, and voices wailing in a language foreign to me. As we walked by the large front window the heads inside turned and brown eyes gazed impassively at us from brown faces. Louis called out something unintelligible, and a man inside looked up from his game of chess and raised his hand in greeting without a smile or a word. I wondered how they could hear each other, or even think, with that racket pounding the air. I felt it under my feet, and through my body. The music wasn’t disagreeable, but it seemed to me my heart was speeding up and slowing down, trying to beat in time with the drums because its own little rhythm was in danger of being drowned out.
We kept walking and left the music behind, though it never truly faded. The ground still vibrated as if a gigantic heart were beating away beneath the earth. “I don’t have a lot of money,” I said in answer to Roger. “I couldn’t rent a place of my own for long.”
He laughed, and Justine squeezed my arm as she smiled up at me. “Money isn’t important. People here look out for each other,” Louis replied. “You probably have more money than any of us anyway, since your relatives are at least speaking to you.”
“What’s that you say?” Roger barged in. “Are your relatives not speaking to you?”
Louis stared straight ahead as he walked. “Mind your own damn business, Thurmon.”
“Landis, do you even have any relatives?”
Louis ignored the question, his lips pressed together in a thin line. Justine and I exchanged a look. “This way,” Louis told us and stopped at an overgrown lot, scraggly with lilac bushes, on which three dilapidated warehouses stood. A light shone from a window in one of them. Justine glanced at me again and I shrugged, having no idea where we were—or what time it was, for that matter. “Let’s see who’s home!” Louis said, suddenly cheerful again, and led us through the scrabbly yard to that window. Gravel and broken glass crunched under our feet, and Justine wobbled over the uneven ground in her high heels.
Without knocking, Louis opened the front door and marched right in, making the two men seated at the table inside look up from their writing. One of them I recognized: that actor, Artaud. “Hey—excuse me!” said the other man as he turned around in his chair to glare at us.
“Open up, it’s the police!” blared Louis as walked over to them. He seized a glass from the sideboard and poured himself some wine from the bottle on the table. “We’re very sorry to disturb you, monsieur, but this is an emergency,” he teased the stranger. “Someone has been killed! Therefore, I’ve orders to confiscate all your alcohol.” And he drank. In a large chair by the window Genica awakened, her hair unbound and streaming in bronze waves over the upholstery, her eyes blinking sleepily as she looked around as if for evidence of an accident, or a murder. The strange man at the table merely laughed at Louis’s joke. Artaud watched Louis gulp the wine, then raised his own glass and said very solemnly, “To Death.” Louis grinned and they both drained their glasses, and only the lines around Artaud’s eyes showed humor.
The other man stood up with a smile and waved us inside, reaching out to shake Roger’s hand, then to extravagantly kiss Justine’s—on his knees, no less. “It’s a Surrealist ritual,” he explained. After his lips touched her knuckle he grinned up into her eyes with the same eager admiration Roger had shown. I shut the door and turned to find Genica’s almond eyes, calm but curious, on me. Our gaze held for a long moment. “Careful, Geoff!” Roger teased me, low, and presented Justine and I to the two men.
Antonin Artaud’s friend, a poet named Robert Desnos, lived in this cavernous place, which was one of several abandoned warehouses standing in a truck yard that was no longer being used. Desnos had far less reserve than Artaud; in fact they were the opposite of each other, Artaud quiet and contained, Desnos careening about with brash humor. Like Artaud, Desnos too had unusual eyes: blue, wide, and luminous, they nearly jumped out of his round face, whereas Artaud’s eyes seemed to flash from beneath his straight brows. It gave me an eerie feeling, the sight of these two men sitting in this dark room with their writings and those eyes of theirs. Like two warlocks—although with his full cheeks and lips, Desnos more resembled a clown.
For his part, Artaud was smiling again at me, but it was not a friendly smile. Unlike Desnos he did not seem to be a very friendly person, and I sensed immediately that he was sneering at me.
“Yes, we are writing poetry,” Desnos answered Justine as he pulled more chairs around the table for us to sit in. He carelessly dragged the chairs over the scratched wood floor, wincing at how they squawked, but still unwilling to lift them. Genica languidly watched us from her chair and made no effort to join the group. “We’re so cultured. I was writing down one of my nightmares, and Artaud here is working on a sweet little piece about suicide.” He gave us a rather silly grin and flopped into a chair himself.
“I thought Surrealists wrote about love,” Justine objected, “and freedom, of course.”
These Surrealists again! I thought, and mutely accepted a glass of wine passed to me by Louis. But of course—Artaud was their president. I couldn’t understand why we were here, when Louis had spoken so disparagingly of them earlier. Louis caught me brooding and raised his eyebrows at me, and up went that hairline.
“Love?” Desnos leaned forward, brightening. I noticed his sleeve had a hole at the elbow. “I write about love. I write about love all the time!” He was handsome in a strange way, despite his full lips and round cheeks and puffy rings about those alert eyes that made him look as if he had just been surprised out of a nap. No matter how much he jerked his head around his smooth black hair stayed exactly where he had combed it, whereas Artaud’s long waves slid over his forehead at his slightest movement. Desnos gazed at Justine with an almost fanatical focus. “Poetry is a quest for knowledge, and so is love. It’s a basic urge, not literary.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m on a quest for knowledge,” Artaud objected. All this time he hadn’t taken his eyes off me. I found his scrutiny annoying. Such a strong voice seemed odd coming from a man so slight, although now I could see that he was in truth the same height as I was. His words effortlessly filled this huge place. “Not knowledge so much as imagination. When I hear the word ‘knowledge’ I think of science and logic and nonsense like that.”
Yes, I thought with an unexpected vehemence, and that’s what makes him dangerous. “Because knowledge,” I declared out loud, “builds a civilization and imagination tears it down. Knowledge obeys authority and stays within certain limitations, whereas imagination walks where it pleases, in whom it pleases. Imagination makes a respectable man fall in love with a whore, or a peasant woman hear angelic voices, like Joan of Arc.” Or a son blame his father, I mused in disgust.
Artaud was nodding. He smiled again at me, but I didn’t return it. “Exactly. Knowledge builds civilization, and civilization is nonsense. Knowledge constructs all sorts of nonsense—institutions, traditions, scholarship, society, the Church, the family—knowledge gives us a false life.”
I shook my head. “Do you really believe that? That traditions are false, that society is a lie?”
What’s the matter with you? demanded a voice in my head. You’ve said the same thing.
In reply, Artaud picked up one of his sheets of paper and read what he had written. His voice bounced against the walls, giving me the unsettling impression that it was really the objects in the room—the chairs, the table, the glasses, the windows—that were speaking. Unlike most illusions, it refused to go away. I’m just tired, I thought, but in fact I was curiously alert.
Here where others present their works I pretend to nothing more than to submit my soul.
Life is a combustion of questions.
I can’t conceive of art that doesn’t touch life.
I don’t love detached creation. I can no longer conceive of the mind detached from itself.
Each of my works, every one
of my maps, every one of the glacial blooms of my inner soul drips down my
body.
I see myself as much in a letter written to describe the shriveling of my being and the mad castration of my life, as in an essay outside of myself that is to me like the illegitimate offspring from a rape of my mind.
I’m pained because the Mind is not in life and life is not the Mind; I suffer from the Mind as entrail, the Mind as interpreter, the Mind as destroyer of things to absorb them into the organ of Mind.
I hang these words in flesh, to be eaten from without, and mostly by the tearing snaps and thrashes of my future self.
When he finished everyone was silent for a moment, captured by the strangeness of these words uttered in those deep and tormented tones.
“I like that,” Louis said, “much more than the pretty little agonies Breton writes about. Why won’t La Nouvelle Revue Française publish your stuff? How long have you been corresponding with the editor—a year, now?”
“A year, yes. Jacques Riviere accepts my letters, but not my poems,” Artaud replied. “He’s almost become a personal confidant. I’m not sure where it will lead. No, he won’t publish anything that I write in his magazine. He wants me to first develop a unified literary style, and he doesn’t accept the fact that my writing is an attempt to congeal fragmented thought. So how can my literary style become unified when my mind isn’t? I cannot create polished poems when my thought abandons me, leaving me with disjointed images that I’ve only managed to steal before they’ve slipped back into the void.
“I’m writing about life,” he went on. “But Riviere is an intellectual, and intellectuals think in terms of metre, balance, imagery, style.” His shirt sleeves stuck out of his gray suit as he raked his hair back with his hands. I noticed his suit was much too small for him. It made him look as if he’d suddenly grown over the past few hours, it was so tight.
“What do you mean—your thought ‘abandons’ you?” I asked.
“I mean that I cannot reach my ideas,” he replied. “My ideas solidify out of a formless mass, as it were, and I can follow the thought up to a point, but then I’ve lost the whole concept, abruptly, totally. I lose the thought—or rather, I lose what the thought could have been, had it completed itself. There is an inherent discontinuity in my mind that renders much of my inner life incoherent, even to me.”
“But you are thinking now,” I argued. “We’re all thinking every minute, and so are you, and you’re speaking, and your speech is perfectly coherent and continuous.”
Artaud smiled as if he’d heard this before. “What we are thinking about now—what we think about most of the time—is how to function socially. That’s different than self-expression.”
I shrugged; he had a point.
Justine asked, “Jacques Riviere is the editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française? What sort of poetry have you been sending him?”
“Much more conventional stuff than what I’ve just read to you,” Artaud replied. “Verse in the manner of Poe, Rimbaud—”
“Hardly conventional!” Justine said.
Artaud gazed at her with appreciation. “In that they attempted to be ‘poems’ at all, that they conformed to more traditional poetic forms, they were conventional. Now I’ve decided to give up poetry entirely and try to simply describe my inner life, the experience of not being able to write, the struggle to speak. ‘Unified literary style’—to hell with it. Honesty is my style, if I have a style.”
I drifted in and out of awareness as the group around the table flitted from one topic to another, joking and laughing around the circle of light cast by the oil lamp on the table. It was late and even though I was enjoying myself, I felt a need to withdraw; I felt drained. Being around too many people for a long time sapped my energy. Genica watched the group with an inscrutable contentment from her chair, and whenever I dared I let my gaze roam over her, watching the lamplight ripple through her hair, watching the skin at her neckline pulse with her breath. It seemed to me that Artaud’s search for poetry ended in that chair, with her, with the secrets that she held; but here he sat chatting with everyone else, neglecting her, although she seemed not to mind—or at least she seemed to be accustomed to it. She watched him always with a small smile as if she knew that she owned him, and I leaned my head into my hand, dizzy from the thudding of my heart, and tasting brine in my mouth. My God, oh my God, she owned me—but she didn’t smile at me like that. At me, she didn’t smile at all.
It was Desnos’s turn to recite the poem that he was writing, and its abrupt melancholy, so at odds with his manner, caught in my throat like a breath:
So often have I dreamed of you that you’ve become a dream.
Is it too late to touch your living body and to kiss
on those lips the birth of the dear voice that I love?
So often have I dreamed of you that my arms used as they are
to imprison the span of your shadow upon my breast perhaps
would not cross the space of your body.
And, in the presence of that real illusion that has haunted and ruled
me for days and years, I might myself sink into mere shadow...
“It’s not finished yet,” Desnos added.
“That is beautiful!” Justine exclaimed.
So intimate were the words of this poem for me that I turned away from the bronze-haired woman on her Persian throne like a bashful youth afraid to let the queen see him blushing.
Roger and Louis, however, had not even glanced Genica’s way since sitting down at the table; their attentions were all for Justine. “My father was Greek, and my mother, part Italian,” I heard Justine say, “but my great-grandfather on Mother’s side was a full-blooded Irishman. I grew up in Turkey, got uprooted to Italy, and escaped to Dublin when I was nineteen, as soon as I could slip out of my mother’s ring of spies. Ireland is wonderful. Then—”
“Where in Turkey?” Artaud asked excitedly, his vague glance suddenly piercing again.
“In Smyrna. We lived near an older couple named...” Justine furrowed her brow. “Oh, I can barely remember. When I was young, there was a girl I played with who visited her grandparents there each summer, until they died. Marie—Marie Something.”
“Marie-Ange?” Artaud prompted.
Justine nodded. “Marie-Ange! That was it. She was eight and I was ten. What a pest she was. She had a brother my age—” Justine’s voice faded and she looked confused for a moment. Artaud tilted his head and smiled tenderly at her.
“Oh, my God!” Justine exclaimed, reaching out to touch Artaud’s arm. “You’re Nanaqui. Nanaqui Nalpas, can it be?” Artaud nodded, his smile widening. His smile, when it was kind and honest rather than sarcastic, jolted one with its beauty transforming a face that had looked so menacing and closed, the face of a medieval statue. “I hit you in the head with a rock and knocked you out cold—”
“You threw my copybook into the water, first,” Artaud chided her gently.
Roger looked from Artaud to Justine. “What’s this? You two know each other?” Such dismay in that normally confident face! Louis and I exchanged a grin behind his head.
“Nanaqui Nalpas. I can’t believe it!” Justine laughed merrily and turned to me. “We were neighbors in Smyrna as children over the summer. I was always so angry at him because he would never play with us, and I got stuck with Marie-Ange. You were ill all the time, according to your mother—”
“I was ill,” Artaud replied, “though not all the time.”
“But that day when I saw you on the quai writing in your little book, I thought you were a liar. I grabbed his book and threw it in the water, and Marie-Ange came at me screaming her head off, so I picked up this rock—she ducked—and I put him out for four hours.”
“My God, Justine,” Louis laughed, “you’re violent!”
Artaud added, “You never apologized, either.”
Justine’s jaw dropped. “I did, too! I went over to your house later—after a pretty severe whipping, which I deserved, of course—” Justine covered her face with her hand, her cheeks growing pink,
“—and your mother said that you were awake, but she wouldn’t let me near you. In fact, I think that rock-throwing incident was the last time I saw you. My mother moved to Italy later that year. And your mother wouldn’t let me see you to apologize; she made me apologize to her.”
“Oh?” Artaud looked surprised. “She never told me about that at all.” He paused, then shook his head. “That sounds like her.”
“Why were you going under the name of Nalpas, then?” Roger demanded. “Or is ‘Artaud’ a pseudonym?”
“Neither is a pseudonym. Artaud is my surname. Nalpas was my maternal grandfather’s name,” Artaud replied easily. “I was usually mistaken for a Nalpas, since my cousins and I look like brothers. And Nanaqui is a nickname that my grandmother gave me.”
“Nanaqui—a diminutive of the name Antoniaki, the Greek version of Antoine,” Justine explained, misinterpreting the consternation on the blond man’s face.
“You’re just don’t understand big families, Roger,” Louis put in. “You’re not from the Mediterranean. You’re not Greek, and you’re not Moroccan…” At this, Desnos leaned back in his chair, a huge grin on his face.
“Oh? So you understand about big families? Because you’re Moroccan?” Roger lashed back. “Or Egyptian? Or Libyan?” Louis fell silent. “Christ, I’ve never met anyone else who keeps his past such a secret!”
“Such a tender friendship,” Desnos gloated. “Every time you come over you two fight over Landis’s past.” His luminous blue eyes darted to me, and he winked.
There were voices outside and someone pounded on the door. Desnos answered it and let in a group of five or so friends. Before any introductions could begin more people walked right in, so he left the door open to the warm night air. Some of the people I recognized from the theatre this evening, but most were complete strangers. There was only the one smoking lamp on the table to shed its weak beams, so people began lighting the candles that were sitting on a nearby shelf, walking with them and dripping their wax onto the floor to stick them in. This resulted in more shadows being flung across the walls, covering our elongated motionless ghosts with gray animated ones.
I watched in alarm as thin skirts swirled near the flames of the candles on the floor, but no one else seemed to care. In the flickering light the heavily painted faces of the women, and of some of the men, loomed exaggerated and pale, their eyes sunken, their expressions bored. Among them Robert Desnos walked with his casual humor, drawing them out, making them laugh and encouraging them to talk to each other. He had a self-depreciating manner that set one immediately at ease, and it won out over their superior airs. He was naturally friendly and obviously everyone liked him, and I realized that I liked him, too.
Soon the place was packed with young people talking and laughing, standing about, sitting on the floor, and stepping out of the upper windows in the loft to dangle their legs from the roof. One particular group of men sat apart from the others, near the ancient wood stove, very intent upon their own intense discussion. “More Surrealists—of the peasant stock,” Louis muttered as he jerked his chin toward them, and exchanged a knowing glance with Artaud.
“Now, now,” Desnos admonished Louis humorously. “Let’s all get along.”
“Who are they?” I asked again, forcefully so that I would get an answer this time. Desnos at least would tell me, of that I was certain. “Who exactly are these Surrealists? They sound like a political faction to me.”
“Sh! Keep your voice down!” Roger waved my words off and glanced over at that group, but he sounded amused, not alarmed. “You’re too tanked to protect yourself if you insult them and start a brawl here.”
“I am not tanked!” I returned indignantly, and Justine smiled down at my empty glass. With a flourish, Roger filled it again for me. “Why don’t you just answer my question? Tell me who they are. Are they a religious sect?”
At this Justine, Roger, and Louis all burst out laughing. Artaud flicked his cigarette ash into a saucer and contemplated me with a look of sidelong contempt. I was suddenly seized by an urge to reach out and give his collar a challenging yank. “Well, we practically are!” Desnos said in my defense as he laid a calming hand on my shoulder. I caught the glance he exchanged with Artaud and the slight shake of Desnos’s head as if to say, Not this one. “We may as well declare ourselves a religion and start naming martyrs and writing down doctrine for all the fun we’ve been lately, waging holy war amongst ourselves.”
Roger wiped his face and smiled apologetically at me. “The Surrealists are not an easy group to label, Geoff. They’re poets but they’re engaged in a revolt against literature—you might say they’re anti-intellectual intellectuals, but their ideas are constantly in flux. As it happens, they are pretty confused about who and what they are right now, and—”
“I am not confused,” Artaud contradicted him.
“—If you ask twenty members what Surrealism is, you will get forty answers.”
“You would get one answer,” Artaud told Roger, “and thirty-nine lashes with a whip, should you ever care to ask me.” The slight lines around his mouth and eyes suggested the ghost of a laugh. In reply, Roger raised his glass and smiled the same biting grin Artaud had given us from the café window.
Someone wound an old victrola and put on a record, and the frenetic melody wavered beneath the buzz of so many voices. Waves of smoke caught the candlelight and stretched it across the ceiling like the most delicate of cobwebs. Winking and sliding, the smokelight reflected back onto faces and arms, and enveloped bodies in a weird gauze. Some people were trying to dance in this crowded place and their efforts were met with protests from the Surrealists, who were getting stepped on, yet they refused to move. They in turn were mocked by Desnos, who shouted that anyone who wanted to dance should go ahead and do so, and that anyone who sat on his floor did so at his own risk.
A flared skirt somewhere in the crowd suddenly whirled into flames around the girl who had danced too close to a candle, and I gasped. But she merely unfastened the flimsy cloth, dropped it to the floor, and stepped away, a shaky hand to her mouth as she stood giggling in her slip and hose. “It’s all right, Geoff,” Justine reassured me. I had half-risen from my chair to throw my jacket over the flames. “They’re putting it out. It’s all right.” Desnos was heroically jumping on the smoldering dress to thunderous applause. His grin never faltered and the dancing never stopped. Feet stomped on other feet; elbows knocked ribs; heels caught shins, and soon the tinny phonograph made an agonized screech and was quiet again.
We remained at the table. Roger lit Justine’s cigarette with an expensive-looking silver lighter and smoke curled from her tiny nostrils as she laughed at what he said into her ear. Louis was leaning halfway out of his chair, straining to see the woman who was lying on her chest on the floor in front of me, and bending her legs over her head so that her toes touched her hair. Her short skirt drifted down to her waist and casually exposed her garter-belt and skimpy underpants. This display bothered no one but me, and I realized in utter humiliation that I was fully aroused. I just wasn’t used to seeing women flounce around in those half-smocks people called dresses these days, with no sleeves at all and the skirts riding up their thighs; as a matter of fact I wasn’t used to the company of women, period. And I wasn’t used to groups—certainly not a crowd of bohemians like this. I wasn’t sociable; I was a loner and had been one all my life, although I had to admit that a year of almost complete isolation hadn’t taught me to love solitude, either. I wasn’t happy being a loner. It was not something I’d chosen.
When I turned my flaming cheeks away from the acrobat I found myself looking right into the eyes of Antonin Artaud, who was staring back at me without any emotion. He did not avert his eyes out of politeness while we looked at each other, so I automatically did. A low chuckle from him made me look up again. He was still openly gawking at me, this time with a thin-lipped smile as if he enjoyed my discomfort. I leaned my elbow on the table and downed the wine in my glass, fiercely wanting to get the hell out of here.
“A flock of tsk-ing church ladies, that’s what the Surrealists will become if Breton doesn’t listen to Artaud,” Desnos concluded, as if no time at all had passed between his last conversation with us and this one. “And look around you. Is Breton here? No, he never comes to see me anymore.” He left us again and bustled about, chatting easily with one group, then another. There were so many people here; how could one man have so many friends? How could anybody remember all of their names? Desnos did though, and Louis knew a lot of them too, for he kept waving at different people the whole time as he talked with us. I guessed that Roger must know them as well, but he was glued to Justine. So was Artaud.
“I’m sorry about how my mother acted. She was very possessive of me,” Artaud continued his story as he turned back to Justine. “And so was my sister.”
Justine glanced heavenward. “That’s putting it mildly!”
“Apparently, so were you, Justine,” Roger sighed. “I certainly didn’t have girls fighting over me when I was ten.”
“Roger, you have to withhold something in order to make it worth fighting for,” Louis chuckled.
“Do you speak from experience, Landis?”
Justine and Artaud were ignoring this exchange. “Well, I apologize now, to you,” Justine said. “I’m sorry I clobbered you. I was aiming for your sister.”
Artaud laughed softly. “I don’t mind. But I never recovered my poems. It doesn’t matter, though,” he added quickly, seeing Justine’s stricken look. “When I was seventeen, I deliberately destroyed everything I had written anyway—so, you merely saved me extra trouble.” Artaud stood up. Justine, taken aback, glanced at me.
“Self-annihilation,” I mused out loud, and Artaud nodded. “But what for? Why?”
“I think it’s more courageous,” Artaud said, leaning toward me to speak directly into my ear, “to annihilate oneself and start one’s life over, than to keep a dead part of oneself hidden.” Genica stretched in her chair, holding out a hand to him, and he went over to rest his hands on her shoulders, but before he did, he gave me a malicious look. I sat still, watching him caress Genica’s skin. All his attention was now on her.
Louis leaned close to Justine. “Maybe I should mention something… Artaud spent four years in several sanitariums after he was prematurely discharged from the French Army. Some vague nervous disorder. It still affects him. In fact,” he continued, seeing the alarmed look that rose in her eyes, “it drives his poetry. He plays with it, uses it.”
Justine sighed. “It’s curious, isn’t it, the way that our lives turn out. I often wondered what had happened to him. My mother left my father that summer and took me with her to Italy, and I didn’t see Smyrna again until I was seventeen. Then there was the war...” She turned and called out to Artaud, “How is Marie-Ange, by the way?” And she muttered to me, “I didn’t mean to call her a pest to his face!”
Artaud looked up. “Oh, she’s well. She was married not too long ago. I’ll mention you when I next write to her. I’m sure she would want to see you again.” His eyes met mine briefly before settling back upon his beloved.
I kept my eyes on him, but he was ignoring me now.
“Hello again, monk,” said a feminine voice with an affected purr into my ear, making me start. I turned and saw that Bernice girl leaning over me. When she saw Justine sitting between Roger and I, she straightened up and smiled rather brittlely. “So who’s your friend, Geoff?”
She said my name, but it was Roger she was looking at, the little fool. “Which one?” I asked her, feigning innocence.
“Who are you?” Roger chimed in, edging closer to Justine, and Bernice regarded him coolly, one hand on her hip. Then she tossed her hair and stalked away to join the group of young women who were gathered around Genica like penitents around a sibyl. Artaud narrowed his eyes at Bernice in obvious dislike, and she glowered back at him in turn, but Genica and she spoke easily to each other.
Justine and I laughed, but Louis muttered in my ear, “Watch out for that Bernice. She’s completely untrustworthy. Unlike Roger, of course,” he teased in a warning tone to Justine. “He’s only relatively untrustworthy.”
Hearing this while on his rounds, Desnos propelled himself back to our table as if he had just burst the bars of a cage. “And what about me?” he demanded eagerly with pungent whisky breath. “Aren’t I untrustworthy? Don’t you think I’m an utter rake?”
“Desnos, I would trust you with my sister’s honor,” Louis replied, waving him off. “That is, if I had a sister,” he added, glaring a warning at Roger before Roger could tease him again. “You are the most heroic, chivalric, honorable gentleman that I have ever met!” His comments drew a disappointed groan from the poet.
Even though she was not out of my hearing Bernice was flirting with some stranger, and I turned my back on her. That was the kind of woman Marianne had longed to be, worldly and fashionable and useless. Simple Marianne, filled with dreams from cinematic melodramas, seeing herself as the girl portrayed by Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. I couldn’t blame her, though; a useful life was not particularly fun and my wife had spent her whole existence making herself useful, being a servant since the age of nine until marriage at nineteen—and even from then on. A wife was still a servant. Compared to Bernice’s bold talk Marianne’s flirtation with me had been timid and sugary. Perhaps it had only been an experiment on both our parts that shouldn’t have gone any further than our few exchanged notes. She hadn’t found the life she wanted by becoming my wife.
Roger brought Justine her refilled glass and nodded toward Genica. “I hope you’re not planning to throw any more stones, my dear. She’s as possessive as Artaud’s mother, and he’s even worse about her.” Seeing Justine’s wrinkled brow, he drew closer and said confidently, “You were in love with him—”
“Excuse me?” Justine groaned. “I was ten.”
“—And I’ll bet you still are.”
“Even if that’s true, I don’t see how that’s any of your—”
“Leave her alone, Roger,” I said, appalled.
Louis snickered. “What do you throw, Roger, to slow down so many nymphs long enough for you to catch them? Golden apples?”
“Oh, I hit women with other women, my friend—it speeds them all up!”
I withdrew from this clever banter, but Justine pounced. “I wasn’t the only girl in love with him; lots were,” she announced, “especially that mother of his.” Louis snorted into his glass and he set it down, his eyes sparkling at her.
I got up from the table and crossed the room, feeling Artaud’s eyes on me the whole time. I was still insulted, but I didn’t feel like challenging him or even asking him calmly what had prompted his strange remark. Carefully, feeling the effects of the wine, I climbed the ladder to the loft window and stepped outside, squeezing past other people to sit alone near the ledge. As I looked out at the city lights I wondered at Artaud’s words. My sudden plunge into this bizarre atmosphere, along with the alcohol, helped thoughts which at any other time I would have recognized as ridiculous swell now into paranoia.
“The dead part of oneself—hidden.” The soft, soothing voice of reason was shouted down by a crowd of incoherent volleys: Had I given myself away somehow? What was he really talking about? He didn’t know, he couldn’t know, anything about my life or that body buried on my farm. Could he? And then I realized what it was about his eyes that had made me bristle, right away—whenever anyone said something he seemed to not be listening to the words, but weighing them against his own expectations, and patting himself on the back for his accuracy. He knew, or he pretended he knew, what people were going to say before they said it. He wanted people to think that he could read their minds. It was arrogant and it was irritating, but how much of a threat could he really be? And why did it bother me so much?
Because I didn’t bury the body deep enough—because I had planned to dig it up again that night and really dispose of it, before it was discovered, before I was caught.
I became more agitated, even as I tried to reason
with myself. There was no way that this Antonin Artaud could have meant his
words to have the meaning that they did for me. After all, I told myself,
Artaud hadn’t said anything specific; he could have been speaking
metaphorically. Probably he was. But why to me? And why did he look at me that
way, why did he study me in the manner he had ever since that first time at the
café window, and especially while he was reading that piece he wrote, when he
had said the word, “detached?”
I don’t like him, I decided.
I was tired. And I had to admit that I was becoming a little homesick, or at least lonely for Franz. He was probably peeved at how I went gallivanting off without him; that is, if my father hadn’t panicked and called on the police to comb every train station in search of me. They certainly would never expect me to gad about with a bunch of Zigeunern. I pulled out my wallet and counted my money. I certainly wasn’t rich, but I had enough—more than enough in fact—to get to Austria and take care of that business. I could leave tonight.
The dead part of yourself. Artaud’s words were still banging around inside of me the same way that the West Indies music reverberated inside of me from way down the street. Its rhythm was as steady and reflexive as a habit, although as I found myself listening to the music again the beat changed—it slowed, it skipped from one tempo to another with a small jolt and then continued on with a heavier pulse, less frenetic, more hypnotic. And like that music the pace of my thoughts changed, taking on a different rhythm that I found even more alarming than before. Once thought, this new idea could not be forgotten.
After all, I had been seriously ill—delirious, in fact. I had after all been alone for a year, working myself to death, and gnawing away at my own guilt about my wife. I didn’t remember the train trip, and that was certainly strange. To tell the truth, I didn’t remember much of the past year. Was my memory of my last day on the farm just as unreliable? “The Mind as entrail, the Mind as interpreter, the Mind as destroyer of things—” Artaud’s words sang again, chant-like, pounding like the music, pounding like my head. I was getting a headache from it all, the noise and the drinking and my worries and the snatches of conversation still whirling in my head like a poem ripped to shreds and rearranged in no order. Feeling sick, I folded my arms across my chest and leaned my cheek against the cool stone, and unbelievably I heard the word monk repeated inside somewhere in a voice sufficiently surprised to let me know that the rumor about me was still flying.
The last thing I wanted to do right now was confirm my callow reputation by puking right in front of all these sophisticated youngsters, although I could hear someone doing just that in the yard below. My stomach lurched, and I pressed my hands to my ears to stop the sound of wretching.