©Kristine Harley No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without written permission from the author.
At the door of the Deux-Magots I hesitated, and so did the young woman standing beside me. She smiled to see me fumble for the handle, and waited patiently with the sun gleaming on her bright frock. Her brilliant hair was whorled into a thick plait that hung far down her back, from which curling wisps had escaped to frame her face, and the old-fashioned grace of it and of her long, pleated skirt made the other women look silly with their fat legs sticking out and those ugly, helmet-like hats covering their foreheads down to the eyebrows. She wore no jewelry, no perfume, no rouge or lipstick, and her languid, white hands were unadorned. I pictured those hands slapping her lover’s face, and sliding around his neck to grip his back, and I remembered how they had conjured her silent torment in the minds of the audience the night before last.
I had the door open, and every man in the place was appraising her openly but not with crudeness, as intimidated as I was by that effortless noble air. Some of the women raised their noses at her, though they were nowhere near as pretty as she was. In fact, their expressions were tense, while she smiled easily. “Good morning, mademoiselle,” I said, and added, “Athanasiou.”
She didn’t pretend not to recognize me, but her smile was cool and a bit bored. Nodding her thanks, she went in and joined a group of people at a table. I let the door swing shut, having decided not to go in after all, and as I made my way back to the street I was aware that a few of the men snickered at me for having gone so out of my way for a woman who had barely acknowledged me.
What in God’s name did people do sitting in cafés all day? I walked aimlessly for a while, passing café after café and shop after shop, watching the pattern of individual problems as people hurried, talked, ate, argued, drank sullenly, and flirted, and I had again that sense of seeing the entire history of the world in a glance. That’s what a city was, I realized: a collection of eras, philosophies, fashions, and generations for those too impatient to watch the changes over a lifetime. It offered many worlds to choose from—or to create. And like its citizens, Paris revealed all the different facets of its life; the street that took me through a busy marketplace crowded with carts and tents ended up at a spacious and pastoral park, where a fountain threw rainbows against the mist and the shrubs were trimmed into decorative shapes, cones and spheres, but an alley to the left led me into a walled maze like the cloistered streets of some ancient Arabic town, where at the end stood a Metro stop, its Art-Deco steel limbs curling insectile-like around the steps that led down into the darkness. I avoided it.
Carved human faces stared out from the sides of buildings like defiant angels thrown against the stone, and a neon sign twisted into the shape of a goddess with stars over her body coyly saved its light for the setting of the sun. Ventilating shafts rose up like strange humongous flowers from the pavement, stone cupids blew horns from rearing stone horses, and from a opthmologist’s window rows of glass eyes stared out from their shelves for a face.
Finally I entered a small, seedy lunch counter and stood looking around at the crowd, then meandered to the back and leaned against the wall, feeling restless and lonely, not really hungry, and not sure of what to do with myself.
“Hey!”
I jerked my face back from the fingers snapped beneath my nose and Robert Desnos laughed at me, covering the mouthpiece of the public phone he was using. Stay there, he mouthed as he pointed at me, and I obeyed while he turned back to the phone, picking up again in mid-sentence: “‘—With all the fantastical grace of a mermaid.’ And that’s it. Got all that? Please repeat it back to me.” He paused, bobbing his head impatiently to the rhythm of the voice that quacked from the other end of the line. “Yes, fine. Will it make this evening’s paper? Thank you!” He hung up the bell-shaped receiver and, smiling, turned to me. “That moron at the copy desk, can’t trust him even once. How in hell can the misspellings in my copy be my fault, dammit?
“And why are you doing, moping about again?” he asked as he leaned against the wall and folded his arms. I shrugged, biting back the comment that I was not used to people thrusting themselves into my life. “I’ve been watching you, you know,” Desnos continued. “You withdraw a lot. Are you angry about something?” His attention was momentarily diverted, and mine was too, by a woman who walked between us. She smiled at him as he raised his eyebrows at her, a sly grin stretching his lips. She kept walking, then looked back, and seemed crestfallen to note that he had turned back to me. “I’ve only one true love,” he stated dramatically. “It’s déjà vu, vous.”
“I’m not angry—” There it was again, that guilt, as if I were wasting his time. Why should my moods interest him? What did he want to know about me? “It’s just that I’ve spent a lot of time away from people. I’m not used to being sociable. Actually, I’m surprised I still know how to converse at all.”
“Oh, talking is no problem,” Desnos replied. “Having a point to make is something else again, for certain people at least, if you follow me.” He fiddled with an imaginary monocle and cleared his throat in a loud, haughty harrrauumph that made people at the bar turn and look at us. The imitation of Breton was impeccable. He laughed and I laughed too. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he added then, “you shouldn’t act so overwhelmed around our little tribe. I’ve listened to some of them blat out their brains for years without showing as much insight as I heard coming from you in one evening. They’re already gossiping about you, you know.”
“Who, the Surrealists?” I asked. “About me?”
He nodded vigorously. “You’ve stung Breton. He’s not used to such disobedience from his fellow revolutionaries. These thrilling audiences with him are by invitation only. You barged in—one rule broken. I didn’t warn you at the time because I wanted to see what would happen. And what happened was, no one threw you out—shades of our old anarchist days. Obviously, that means you have some sort of influence.” Desnos’s protuberant blue eyes widened with his grin. “Then you yawned through Breton’s speech, but that’s a rule everyone breaks. And you left! When you wanted to!” He put a hand to his cheek in mock horror. “Of course, the news that you showed up with Landis at my place later when Artaud was there got back to him. He wants to know exactly who you are, what your game is, and why you’re such a snob.”
I lifted my hands and let them fall to my sides as Desnos laughed uproariously. “I can’t believe this!” I exclaimed. “I’ve been here only three days, and he’s going through that turmoil about me while I’m worrying about my abandoned turnip crop? Do these people know there’s a world outside of themselves? It’s incestuous—it’s absurd.” I made a sweeping dismissal of the room with my hand.
“Well, of course it’s ridiculous,” Desnos replied. “That’s why I’m telling you, don’t be so self-depreciating, because it certainly isn’t catching. ‘Incestuous’—the very word for it.” He bobbed his head in affirmation.
“They shouldn’t bother. I’m nobody. I’m no artist—just a hick.”
“There you go again.” He offered me a cigarette, stuck it in his own mouth when I declined, and began searching his pockets for a match. He nodded toward the exit and we picked our way through the tables. “No one thinks you’re a hick but yourself. Landis likes you and so does Artaud—and so do I.” He cocked his head at me and I smiled back. “Besides, I’m no artist, either. I’m allergic to artists. All the best people are. Where were you going just now, before I nabbed you?”
We reached the sidewalk. I looked up the street and saw a group of yelling schoolboys burst out of an iron gate and spill out into the avenue to go home for luncheon. “Nowhere,” I said. “To find some adventure, I guess. To find some work, maybe,” I added without much enthusiasm. I wasn’t a citizen; I didn’t even know if I needed special papers first. Franz could undoubtedly help with that, but the thought of my brother finding me some boring position at his damned bank made me want to camp out on a bench myself.
Desnos groaned. “If it’s adventure you’re after, don’t get a job!” He turned to see what I was looking at and watched the last stragglers leave the school yard, and curled his lips in disdain at the emergence of a man who appeared to be the headmaster. The old boy was smartly dressed and swinging a cane, and clutching his briefcase with an air of defensive dignity. Other men came out, some solitary, some in pairs, chatting and making genteel grimaces.
Desnos glanced at me, raised his eyebrows, then walked up to the gate and peered in. I followed close behind him. Beyond the gate lay a manicured lawn, a playground, and a large stone building. “I hated school,” I whispered.
“So did I!” Over his shoulder he beamed me a look of approval. “Artaud was a good student; I was horrid. Let’s see: ‘Talkative, disorganized, disrespectful, lazy, disobedient...’” and he paused, ticking off the adjectives with his fingers, his gaze momentarily vague. “…And ‘scatterbrained…’” We grinned at each other. “And ‘deceitful!’ I liked that one especially, because it’s not the same as ‘liar.’ They could have called me that instead if they hadn’t been taken in by me, every single time.” He put on the most disarming, innocent face to illustrate his point, and we both guffawed.
I scanned the empty schoolyard in silence, not particularly willing to divulge my own teachers’ comments: stupid, ugly, worthless, foul-mouthed, whining, wicked. “Let’s go in!” I suggested instead. The poet motioned for me to go first and I did, stealthily crossing the empty walled yard. Nonchalantly we opened the main door and stole inside the building.
I felt a spasm of the old dread when I stood in the hallway and saw the empty coat hooks lined up beside the classroom doors all neatly closed. I opened a door, more to disrupt this threatening orderliness than out of any curiosity; a classroom was a classroom. Desnos, though, ran into the room eagerly and began riffling through the drawers of the teacher’s desk, and I went up to the blackboard. “Hmm,” he said, shutting the last drawer in disappointment, “nothing of interest here.”
“He’s one of the discipline freaks,” I said, running my finger along the chalk tray at the base of the board. No dust came off on my finger and I held it up for him to see.
Desnos smiled grimly, in turn holding up a carpet-beater to show me. The thing was old and chipped, and had obviously been used on many little boy bottoms. “He’s a bastard.”
He swung the thing around as I looked about the room. The desks were in perfect rows—did this man walk down the aisle, examining the placement of the legs along a line drawn on the floor? A particularly sadistic nun had done that to my class one year. Not a drop on any desk from the inkwells, either. The yellowing walls and streaked windows grayed with the sky as dark clouds outside obscured the sun. “Let’s go,” I said, humiliated and angry for having to fight for breath in this place, as if my memories now loomed over me even as my teachers shrank in stature.
“No, let’s do something mean to him!” Desnos put the switch down and turned to examine the immaculate blackboard. He picked up the chalk and made a clear dot in the middle of it. Then he went to the desk and inked a pen, and wrote as I watched:
You are instructed to surrender your iceberg blue buttocks.
AND NO QUESTIONS ASKED! Deliver them onto the
tongue of the Marbled Lady’s bejeweled porpoise at midnight
tomorrow afternoon. THIS IS AN ORDER!
“Someone else could get blamed for it,” I said, and pointed to the switch. Desnos contemplated this a moment, then left the note on the desk and walked down the aisle, where he put his hands in the air in the manner of a Spanish dancer and “Ole!” kicked over one of the desks. I silently guffawed as he ground his foot into the spreading puddle of ink and trod toward the door, leaving man-sized footprints on the dull immaculate floor.
Footsteps rang in the hall, the footfalls not matching his, and Desnos stopped short. The steps in the hall came closer. As the door to the classroom began to open Desnos threw his weight against it, and I ran over to help him. Someone on the other side of the door lunged against us as we held it fast. “Open this door! Who is there?” demanded a man’s voice.
“Who is there? Who is there?” mocked Desnos. A boy’s excited shout laughed against the walls behind the intruder.
“Who are you?” growled the strange voice.
“Who are you!” Desnos answered.
The door strained against us, and through the crack I caught a glimpse of the headmaster’s red face. “Open this door!”
“Teacher’s pet!” shouted Desnos. “I’m the principal now. I’ll beat you for this! Violation number one: how dare you show up for school so early!”
“Violation number two: how dare you show up for school at all!” I chimed in. Our sniggering was echoed by several young voices in the hallway, and the headmaster barked at them to leave. With my foot I hooked the leg of one of the desks and pulled it over to us. We shoved it against the door but it wasn’t high enough to lodge beneath the handle, so I held the door while Desnos grabbed two more desks.
The sound of voices coming around the building to the windows made us give this up. “I thought these idiots had gone! Weidmann, when we go out the gate, turn right, head along the Seine and keep going,” the poet instructed, and we pulled ourselves up onto the sill. Jumping through the open casement, we landed on the muddy ground in the center of a ring of exclaiming boys who chased us as we ran for the gate, two of them shouting for the headmaster, and the rest urging us on. Light rain was falling again from the sky. We rounded the wall and ran into the noonday traffic with two little monsters still pursuing us, now calling to another teacher who was running up the sidewalk in a comical stride, his head cocked to the side and an addled look on his face.
As we passed this man he put up a finger as if inquire, I say, do you think you could listen to my brief reprimand? and was tackled to the ground by the heroic leap of the brat who had been aiming for me. We looked back, still running, to see the other boy’s legs give out. He stopped, puffing, then scooped up a rock and hurled it at us. As it fell short Desnos stopped long enough to squat and present everyone with a clear view of his bare buttocks, which drew a roar of approval from the group of boys at the gate. The headmaster ran braying out of it to shake a fist, and the fallen instructor sat up and with a pained expression exploded an enormous sneeze into his handkerchief. Heads poked out of windows from the buildings around us as we passed, and there was laughter or tsking from a few people who had witnessed the whole drama. Desnos looked over at me and cheered when he saw that I was carrying the carpet-beater. “Good thinking, Geoffrey.”
“Fondling!” I snapped, meaning my would-be attacker.
When we reached the Seine we felt safe enough to slow down to a walk, but we had to quicken our pace again as the sprinkling droplets turned into a downpour. With all my might I whipped the switch far into the boiling river. “This way,” Desnos indicated, leading me down some steps to a quai, where several houseboats were swaying gently in the current. He pulled out a key and I followed him down the plank onto one of them. “It belongs to Landis. I was to deliver this key to Artaud so he could stay here tonight, but let’s get out of this rain.” He unlocked the door and we stumbled inside. I shivered out of my jacket and squatted down in front of the tiny wood stove. “Yes, good idea,” Desnos replied as I reached for some wood. “Artaud will need a fire anyway, when he gets here.” He threw his jacket aside and smoothed back his smooth hair.
“I need a fire right now. Does Landis use this place as a studio?” I asked.
Desnos glanced around. “I doubt it. It’s not secure enough to store paintings. I think he just rents it to have a place to think.”
“I could live in a place like this,” I said, feeling the gentle rocking of the cabin on the waves. After a last violent splatter the rain stopped, but the sun did not come out. The fire lapped at the rough boards I shoved into the stove, and the glow was reassuring to me after living the past few days in the alien whitewash of electric lights.
I pulled up a chair and Desnos sat on the cushioned bench, stretching out his hands to the heat. “I can just see you,” he said. “The great hermit violinist living in his houseboat, planting turnips in the parks, and paddling arrogant teachers! Or—” he added as an afterthought, “—pretty girls.” And he tilted his head to examine me when I didn’t smile.
I shook my head. “I’m a failure. I was supposed to inherit the family business but I just couldn’t take it on. Even if my father hadn’t kidnapped me I wouldn’t have lasted one more year at the farm; I was buying more food than I was raising. And now, here I am, down to my last centime, living with my family again.”
“You tried,” Desnos said kindly. “You deliberately left a secure existence. Family business—who wants it?”
“I left a boring existence. But the farm was boring, too. People seem to think it was romantic. Hardly! The difference was, the things I did there I had to do, if I didn’t want to starve, or freeze, or become ill... Here, there’s nothing I must do, and so little that I know how to do.”
Desnos rubbed his hands together before the fire. “So what? Do what you don’t know how to do. Do what you don’t have a right to do.”
“I’ve already done that!”
“You talk like a man who doesn’t think he even has a right to live.”
“Maybe I don’t,” I muttered, looking away.
We were silent for a while after that. Idly I glanced around the primitive cabin that was not unlike my house, but this had a window; one could luxuriously shut the door without needing a candle, although the light from outside was becoming even more dim and grey. Desnos leaned back as rain began to tap again at the roof with the persistence of a recurring thought. “I really don’t want to walk home in this,” he said. “Besides, this weather makes me sleepy.”
I checked my watch. “It’s afternoon, anyway. Half of Paris is closed up.” I felt tired, too; I was being drawn into the rhythm of Paris. No midday naps at the farm, no staying up late nights and sleeping late mornings for me there. A few hours sleep late after sundown had been my routine, especially after Marianne left. For the last month, after trying to get my crops in all by myself, I’d been too exhausted to care how little sleep I was getting. Perhaps my body was making up for it now. But my total amnesia about coming to Paris—that ate at me. Something was wrong there. I still could not remember a thing.
“Take the bench; it’s all right,” I told Desnos. He obediently rolled onto the seat, and I spread out on a pile of old blankets on the floor. It was comfortable enough for me.
“Want a bedtime story?” Desnos asked mischievously.
I rolled to face him. “One you’ve written? Of course!”
He slipped his hands behind his head and recited:
“The North Star sends to the South Star the following telegram: ‘Guillotine at once your red comet and your violet comet, as they are traitors. North Star.’ The South Star’s face clouds, and its brown head bows its charming neck. The feminine regiment of comets at its feet flutters about happily. Pretty canaries in the cage of eclipses. Should it rip its mobile jewels from its pretty red, its pretty violet? Those two comets which, nimbly at the seventeenth hour, reveal beneath a taffeta skirt a knee of the moon? The red comet, with soft lips, friend of adulteresses and whom many an abandoned lover has come upon in his bed, her lashes drooping, pretending to be lifeless the pretty red, her blue clothes, her dark blue eyes, and her dark blue heart like a lost Medusa, far from all shores in a languishing current haunted by phantom ships. And what about the pretty violet! Pretty red-haired violet, so lovably violet, with scarlet ear-lobes, eater of sea urchins and whose bewitching crimes have gradually dropped praiseworthy tears of blood and admired whole skies upon her gown, upon her precious gown. Should she, the charming South Star, choke them in her diamond fingers and heed the warning of the North Star, the magical, tempting, adorable North Star, whose diamond replaces a nipple in a breast warm and white as the shimmer of a noonday sun?
“Steerswomen, comets violet and red, steerswomen of the phantom ship—whither are you leading our cargo of whores and skeletons whose extraordinary lovemaking brings to these lands through which you pass the comfort of eternal love? Sirens! The violet of the violet is the fishing-line, and the red’s knee serves as compass. The whores of our phantom ship are forty-four and here are a few of their names: Rose, Mystery, Hug, Midnight, Cop, Tally-ho, Mad, Hearts-n-Spades, Mine, Yonder, Full, Gold, Green Goblet, Plaint, La Galandine and the mother-of-kings, barely sixteen, the best years, I’ve heard. As a last resort, the skeletons of the Armada battle those of the Medusa.
“Up in the sky float the vanquished Medusas, scattered.
“Before turning comet, the South Star telegrams the North Star: ‘Tilt the sky into your icebergs! Justice is done—South Star.’ Adorable! Adorable!”
I laughed in delight and applauded. “It’s like a fairy tale. I want the prostitute named Hug!”
“Aww, Geoff!” Desnos grinned. “She is the cannibal.”
Long after I heard his heavy breathing in sleep I lay awake, listening to the rain turn the city into layers of chatter like so many synchronized timepieces: the blunt drumming of the houseboat, the slaps on stone, the hollow tinging of a metal roof somewhere. That odd sleepiness, when my heart beats hard and fast in my chest while my mind seems to float above my left ear, pushed me downward into the dark, and at length I allowed myself to be lulled.
At some point I dreamed of Marianne, feeling her softness beside me with my blood pounding, as on that night we first shared a bed, a couch in the parlour to which we crept in the darkness after everyone was asleep. We had already been married that day although it was still a secret, but we weren’t to attempt lovemaking until days later. She was a virgin and knew that I still was, too; she had mistaken that for love. So had I. I often thought back on that night, even now. It had been bliss, a lingering state of frustration when Marianne would moan and catch my exploring hands, allowing me to stroke her a little before pleading with me to let her sleep, our kisses interrupted by exhaustion and resumed by arching dreams. And it had given me the hope, this cleansing, naive bliss, of escaping my violent past and the memory of my distasteful emotional manglings.
When the blond Marianne in my arms changed into a darker woman I did what I occasionally could do when a dream disturbed me: I became aware that I was dreaming. The effort of pushing away Genica’s double woke me, and I saw from the shadows in the room that it was late afternoon. Desnos was still asleep on the bench, his face untroubled, his dark hair still neat. He seemingly had not moved one muscle.
He opened his eyes when I leaned over the table to look out the window. The river sparkled in the wan sun, and the sky was beginning to clear up. “This isn’t a proper boat, is it?” I asked. “It’s not supposed to go anywhere?”
“No, it just floats in one place.” Desnos sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“What is the point of a boat that doesn’t sail?”
“The point,” he replied, “is to avoid hurricanes.”
That made me look at him. “There are hurricanes on the Seine?”
His eyes twinkled humorously at me as I went to the stove and opened its door. “A hurricane is chaos,” he said, “and yet it follows the same physical laws that a clear day follows, that a barometer follows, that a ship’s captain follows. Think about it. Why should shipwreck come as more of a surprise to us than smooth sailing?” he asked. “Why should chaos inspire so much morbid hand-wringing about life? Didn’t any of your crops wilt?”
“Oh, they certainly did!” I declared as I threw more wood into the stove.
He nodded. “Do people therefore plant silk flowers in their fields, just because they would never wilt? No, but they build houseboats. They invent religion. They study the stock exchange. They invent the job, as slavery is called today, and lash themselves to it. They write novels and poems that choke on their own eloquence.”
I nodded sullenly, poking at the coals.
“Is your father pushing you to ‘organize’ yourself?”
“No, he’s perfectly content to let me romp around Paris as his prisoner,” I grumbled, jabbing randomly with my stick.
Desnos ran his fingers through his straight black hair and it fell right back into place as if it hadn’t been disturbed. “Why don’t you write? It’s simple. Go to the theatre or the cinema, or read something, or witness something, call up your paper and say something about it. They print it, and you get paid. You get paid, your landlord gets paid, and the old man can’t locate you.” He smiled to himself.
“You mean you just dictate all your articles over the phone?” I looked back at him in admiration. “I couldn’t do that. I can’t think that fast. Besides—” I closed the stove door and stood up, “—I might not stay in Paris.”
His look of disappointment tugged at me and I lifted my hands. “What’s there for me to do here?” I said it almost to myself.
“What’s there for any of us to do anywhere?” Desnos asked in turn.
“There must be someplace... There’s got to be some way for a man like me to live.”
“Why not look for it here?”
“Here?” I glanced around contemptuously. “Isn’t this the civilized world? No offense, but being a man of letters sitting in some café with his blood as pale as his skin—”
“But I agree with you!” Desnos exclaimed, amused. “Believe me, I feel exactly the same way as you do about academics in tweed, playing pimp with poems. What I’m trying to say is, you’ll meet the same problem no matter where you go. Boredom is the last wilderness. The world, both civilized and not, has been explored. The whole damn world has been at war!”
I shrugged, knowing he was right.
“Instead of walking where the footprints already are, and calling that an adventure—”
“Adventure,” I sneered without intending to, “is that what you call what we did this afternoon? A childish prank, that’s all it was.”
Desnos watched me as I shoved at the pile of wood with my toe. “So what is your idea of adventure, Weidmann?” he demanded. “Enjoying beautiful women? Exploring Africa? Going to war?” I chafed at this. “Couldn’t war be someone else’s childish prank?”
Earnestly I asked, “What’s your idea of adventure?”