“Oh, oh! Those schoolgirl knees! But, ech! the filthy whore… Fire, Fire! Capuchins! Coco Coco! Fascist fire in the gutters!”
The puke-green digits on my little clock-radio declared it was, once again, the dark night of the soul. How does that withered thorax generate so many decibels? Fire! The word shattered my sleep. For a moment, I wondered if flames were climbing the drapes, scuttling over the parquet, then I lay back and sighed. I knew the origin of the voice but it took me a couple of minutes to figure out that of the words. I hadn’t a clue what they meant if, indeed, they ever meant anything to anybody, including the man who strung them together and was now, like the words themselves, unstrung.
With a superannuated surrealist like Emile Rideaux, it’s hard to distinguish the demented hallucinations from his poems; the former are not only very much like the latter but often actually derived from them. Is the old fellow recapitulating or disintegrating? Is he recollecting the verses of the hirsute young man, briefly in vogue half-a-century ago, or did those poems anticipate the scatter-brained ramblings of the forgotten, bald old one?
Though I doubt it, perhaps you once read the final passage from “Feu dans les Tuileries”—the final poem in Parapluies et Sel de Mer:
The fire engines are on fire, also the market;
bursting pomegranates spew flaming seeds
like Catholics in the Chamber of Deputies.
Water dissolved in fire is dribbling down
Trocadéro’s Fascist gutters. Across the street
a whore wearing a soiled bra laughs down
at artless schoolgirls clutching fiercely
at their pet monkeys and innocence.
“More fire!” cries the putain gaily from her
rusty balcony. “More passion, more heat!”
Hoisting a bottle of vin ordinaire, she adds,
“Oi, filles! Better to burn than marry.”
A fleet of destroyers is sailing east, looking for
a war; peace has turned them cranky and impatient.
At dusk, the Gare de l’Est is clogged with sooty
refugees hollering offensive supplications.
“Give us shelter, hand over your baguettes
and douse us in Chanel Number Five!”
The schoolgirls, the fire, the monkeys, the right-wing gutters, the prostitute, Chanel. There they were again, dragged out from who knows what surviving synapses in the scrambled, desiccated brain. Maybe the poem once signified something political. Maybe it’s made of some private, esoteric symbolism. Then again, I can believe it was just a pretentious poseur’s boozy free-association, spruced up later to look like a genuine poem. Ah, the so-called avant-garde. I wonder: if the experts were honest, wouldn’t even they admit they can’t really tell what’s good and lasting from what’s ephemeral and fake?
At first, I thought I got the job because I claimed to have a pharmacology degree from the Université de Grenoble Alpes. On reflection, I wasn’t sure that Rideaux’s children believed me. A lie like that could easily have been exposed, if they’d bothered to check. No, I expect they’d have hired anybody the least bit plausible, alpine degree or no.
They interviewed me in the vast, empty living room of Rideaux’s apartment. He wasn’t permitted to participate and I wasn’t allowed to see him. The three of them sat together on a long, sagging couch. It was covered in worn red velvet and, except for two small tables and a floor lamp, the only piece of furniture in the room. I had to stand before them like a prisoner in the dock or a lazy worker being dressed down. The three of them—all expensively dressed—aren’t like “children” at all. Indeed, they’re a lot more grown up than their unreliable sire who, Raymond confided, was in his “second childhood”. “Or his fifth,” remarked Sylvie, evoking a dry chuckle from Jules. I checked all of them out on the library’s computer. The best story I found was this: despite her warning, Sylvie’s tradition-loving husband insisted on asking Rideaux for her hand in marriage. It seems the poet refused to give his consent until he’d inspected the man’s privates.
Rideaux’s children aren’t the sort who’d care to be seen as abandoning their disreputable, semi-famous dad, though that’s certainly what they all wished to do. And did. I was to be the fig leaf, the caretaker, cook, and pill-dispensing nursemaid. Despite what must have been disorderly early years, all them are what is called “successful”—that is, well off, socially prominent. Of course, their mother’s family would have had the most to do with their position, but could being the offspring of a poet who once had a certain cachet also have given them a leg up, somehow? Or was it a blot on the escutcheon, something to be overcome, denied? Jules is a banker. (“What’s robbing a bank compared to founding one,” cracked Bertolt Brecht.) Raymond is a senior partner in a big accounting firm, and Sylvie’s old-fashioned husband is an aristocrat. His family is so wealthy that his only profession is being rich.
I’m ridiculously well paid. I have a savings account for the first time in my life. At the bank, they nod and smile and call me Mademoiselle Cadeau. I picked that amusing alias because of what it means and because it rhymes with Rideaux. People—I mean people like Rideaux’s children—look at you differently when you have money. If they think you don’t, they try not to see you—save for the predators who look you over like hungry jackals. I was on the streets for more than two years, so I know what I’m talking about.
Here’s my c.v., abbreviated. My father died when I was three, or so my mother told me. The man she called my stepfather was, like her, an addict. He started on me even before I reached puberty. I ran away when I was fourteen and had a tough time of it, but I learned fast. I was picked up in Montmartre and spent two years in a facility for girls. It wasn’t all that bad. I slept warm and ate regularly. They sent me to a school where I didn’t fit in and didn’t care for either the classes or the teachers. I did like the library, though. Learning alone was my style, and I loved reading. After I’d exhausted the school’s exiguous library, I got a card to use the municipal bibliothêque. A shy male librarian of left-wing sentiments had the hots for me and told me what to read—Brecht, for example. For a few kisses, I got a good reading list. At seventeen, I left the institution (without leave) and found a job in one of those discount stores that sell Chinese knock-offs. It didn’t pay much and it was boring and, when the beastly manager tried (unsuccessfully) to rape me, I stopped showing up. Back on the streets, I joined a band of squatters, mostly Arab girls who all carried knives. I wouldn’t say we were close, but we watched out for one another. Some prayed and covered their heads; others didn’t. One day near the Place Vendôme, a bag lady asked me for a cigarette and told me about a charity set up by some women who made a hobby of girls like me. They ran a storefront. For a second cigarette, she gave me the address.
There were two women in charge and piles of clothes, shoes, and a big pot of vegetable soup. For some reason, they took a shine to me. They wanted to dress me. One of them picked out a purple dress that fitted perfectly. It was a decent dress. “Not everybody can wear purple,” Madame Priedieux said to Madame Forbeau, who agreed. “And just look: it’s a perfect fit!” She made me stand in front of the full-length mirror. “Look, Charlotte, at how well it goes with her coloring.” I could wear purple. Then there was a necklace too. They fussed over me as if I were a new doll and talked to each other as if I couldn’t hear them. Then they found me some matching shoes, with low heels. The soup was hot and good. I was a diversion, a project. They made me promise to come back the next morning and I did. Mesdames Forbeau and Priedieux were delighted to see me. They insisted on taking me to breakfast and then to their salon where my hair was washed and cut. “Don’t you feel just like Pygmalion?” Madame Forbeau asked Madame Priedieux, beaming. Then we went back to the storefront and I left with a bracelet and a coat, almost new, once chic. I really did feel like Galatea. Yes, I’d read that story. Later, I discovered that the good women had slipped fifty Euros into the coat pocket.
That very evening, I picked up a copy of Le Figaro outside a Métro station and read the Rideaux advertisement. Why not, I said to myself. After all, I can wear purple.
Emile Rideaux’s apartment is on the Left Bank, 6th arrondisement, the most literary one. There’s not much furniture, less to dust. If you shout, there’s an echo. And the old man shouts a lot, especially in the small hours.
His books are on a special shelf mounted on the wall outside the kitchen. There are nine of them, thin as a chorus line of fashion models. I’ve read them all twice now. They are definitely an acquired taste. Exculpation des Boudoirs is my second favorite after Parapluies et Sel de Mer. There are good bits in Les Globes Oculaires et les Pieds, which, on the whole, is a cruel book. Les Pissenlits d’Ennui, though almost entirely unintelligible, has moments of accidental clarity and some memorable similes: for example, “. . . he cowered beneath a scorched chestnut like an atheist awaiting the descent of grace.”
How does a poet support himself? Just the sort of question somebody like me would ask, isn’t it? Turns out Emile Rideaux did pretty well on the principle my roommate Marianne confided to me one night as we smoked illicit Gauloises outside the institution for roughed-up girls. “Remember, chère chienne, you can marry more money in a minute than you can make in a lifetime.”
Agnes de Montalban was heiress to a mining fortune—colonial spoils no doubt, a rich source of guilt. She was a patroness of the arts—of the experimental more than the good, it has to be said—a benefactress to the generation of ’68, fellow-traveler to dozens of café revolutionaries and disaffected graduate students agitating for a Year Zero. In those days, Emile had the look of an intelligent wild beast. He favored leather jackets like Derrida (yes, I’ve read him), and you can see in the old photographs how his thick black hair and straight nose might have made knees go weak. To a woman of Agnes’s type, a post-Romantic Romantic with a bad social conscience and an appreciation of high style, he must have been irresistibly au courant. She fell in love. Agnes brought Emile along to demonstrations, arranged his readings, saw to it that he was published. She took him out of his basement room, installed him in this colossal apartment and put it in his name. The story is she proposed to him at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in front of a mob that, with joyous self-righteousness, was burning an American Jeep. Fire, Fire.
In addition to her politics and left-wing sympathies, Agnes was famous for her designer outfits. Coco, Coco. She had probably donned something marvelous for the Jeep-burning proposal. I don’t know if she ever wore purple—the interviews and obituaries don’t say, and most of the photos are black-and-white.
To everyone’s surprise, the marriage was a happy one, almost bourgeois in its mutual devotion and stability. Emile, it turned out, loved Agnes back. They had three children in five years, four houses, and a medium-sized yacht. Only his poetry remained surreal. His reputation didn’t last long, but his work was still published and, for a while, he had a teaching post – at the Sorbonne, even. Agnes’ doing in both cases, one supposes.
Eight years into the marriage Agnes accepted her nephew’s offer of a lift to her country estate in Foutainebleau. The nephew was eager to see what his new Maserati could do. Near Évry, he took a turn at speed and rolled the sleek Italian beast into a stand of oak trees. He and Agnes were killed on the spot. After that, it seems Emile farmed out the children, substituted drinking for writing, alienated his friends, and began the long slide into what he is now. You might say he stopped living and started dying. It’s hard not to think that a quicker form of suicide would have been more becoming, though not so advantageous for me. I make a good living off his dying.
You probably want to know more about my relations with Monsieur Rideaux. They are limited. I am dutiful in seeing to his physical and medical needs, calling in the doctor when necessary. I’ve learned to cook the few things that seem to please him. I am punctilious just because I’m sure that his children wouldn’t care if I weren’t. I play his old vinyl records, mostly antiquated rock music, mid-century jazz, and lots of Bach—was that man an alien? In addition to reading Emile’s crazy old poems, I work at filling in the chasms in my education. Thucydides, Shakespeare, André Gide, Boethius, George Bernard Shaw, Paul Valéry, Baudelaire, Jane Austen, René Descartes, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Miguel de Cervantes, Virgil, Dante, Lord Byron, Jules Verne, Marcus Aurelius, the Marquis de Sade, and so on and on… there is no end. Isn’t it wonderful?
You probably have follow-up questions.
Does he even know who you are? It’s doubtful.
Can he go to the toilet on his own? Usually, not invariably.
Do you two ever converse? There have been certain occasions.
Really? And what are these conversations about? Well, “conversations” is too generous a word. If he speaks and then I speak and then if he says something more, I count that as a conversation. These exchanges occur during what I call the dark night of the soul when, awakened by the stentorian narration of his nightmares, I’ve shaken him until he’s either silent or wakes up.
Once, he woke up and went on at length about a trip he’d taken—or imagined he’d taken, or intended to take—to Egypt with Agnes and his fear that she would be unfaithful to him there. “Or I might betray her,” he said with genuine horror. “Oh, and that,” he said with touching anguish, “would be so much worse.”
On another occasion, as dawn was creeping up the windows, he described an encounter in Geneva with an elder poet, a German (or perhaps Austrian) named Gruenmeier. “We talked for hours about Kafka. The old sham claimed to love Kafka like a brother. Later, I discovered he’d joined the Hitler Youth—short pants—and then the SS—black cap. I hope the bastard wound up in a penal colony stretched out like a manuscript, or in the desert talking to jackals. I hope he died like a dog. I ought to have known. His poems are hectic, repellent, long worms convulsed with fever. Why was I cordial with him? Was I flattered he’d heard of me in far-off Berlin? Why did I buy that liberal-democratic connerie? He was too quick to say ‘We’re all guilty.’ Even a six-year-old knows that when everybody’s guilty, nobody is. I should have known. There was a smell of cabbage and diesel fuel.”
“Germans aren’t always worthy of their culture,” I said. “They’ve got a good language for brutal fairy-tales, fiats, and lullabies. Go back to sleep.”
The longest and most lucid speech he’s made to me so far was, curiously, about Tahiti. I believe he had been having an erotic dream when he cried out, “Passionfruit women opening their sex like mangos! Aphrodites of the coconut palms! New Cythera welcomes me as a God!” The apartment resounded with his lascivious enthusiasm.
I trudged to his room. To my surprise, his eyes were already open and he turned them on me greedily. “You!” he howled. “You,” he croaked softly. “It’s no use trying to seduce me. My gift of sex I renounced along with my Mont Blanc. You know. When she died in that stupid accident.”
His thin, mottled hand reached out for me. I drew back. “Shh,” I said. “Calm yourself, Monsieur.”
He did, but went on talking.
“With Bougainville on La Boudeuse. Months at sea and then that blessed isle. We stayed ten days. It was in April, springtime at home; but in that paradise, eternal summer. How disgusting we must have been! We all stank and had ulcers from the scurvy. Those ten days, who could ever forget them? Not our good Captain, always reading his Rousseau. When we sailed away, he wrote in his journal, Farewell happy and wise people, may you always remain what you are. I shall never recall without a sense of delight the brief time I spent among you and, as long as I live, I shall celebrate the happy island of Cythera. It is the new Utopia. But I’ve outlived that fantasy—that and the other as well. Heaven above, Utopia just around the corner. Still, it was a beautiful illusion. It excited all Europe, gave a boost to moral relativism and made Rousseau still more the rage. We were going to build a new society, one like nature, with nature’s own virtues. Liberté, fraternité, egalité!”
I could see he was hallucinating, historically this time. He was evidently in the 18th century, preparing to join the Revolution. “What was it like, Tahiti?” I asked softly.
“New Cythera? Oh, it was sexy. The islanders bathed several times a day, slathered their bodies with oils and perfumes. They stayed out of the sunlight for their skin which wasn’t weathered like ours. The men were impressive, natural, robust men. It seemed to us the women were all young and willing. They paddled out to greet us. Marveled at our ships. Then the girls dropped their clothes. Only much later did I realize this was out of respect for the gods who must have sent us. They danced, put on little plays. Performed practically naked, so we thought their intentions obvious, we sex-starved mariners with foul minds and breath, invitations to an orgy. For all I know, they could have been mocking us.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I know better. Practiced infanticide, the Cythereans. Just like the Greeks. And yet only just now I was entangled with three of those glorious girls. They smelled like Eden on the first day of springtime.”
Suddenly, he sat up and looked at me sharply. “Are you from Tahiti?”
“No, Monsieur. I am from… ” I hesitated, “I am from the streets.”
His face grew pale. He looked at me tenderly then slowly recited the following verses which I recognized as the finale of “Sous les Pavés,” the poem about 1968 that made his name, a poem that—it’s just occurred to me—might have been aimed in advance at his three smug, moneyed, middle-aged children.
You say we’re foolish, drunk and callow; yet we’re alive,
plastering your city with mottos of our preposterous politics,
wielding chalk like sabers, shooting spray paint like napalm:
Reins to the children, we say, guns to the Seine.
You have your money—we, our hair.
Beneath your filthy pavement, our immaculate beach!
Lop off the heads of the moguls, the magnates.
Raise high the guillotine of love!
Anyway, that night was not one of the dark ones of the soul. The old man had drifted back to the good old days, the imagined and the real. He was with Bougainville on Tahiti in 1768 and also with his comrades rioting down the boulevards precisely two hundred years later.
If there really are good old days then they must be when we were good ourselves; that is to say, not yet disillusioned.
As for me, I can claim no good old days. If I am to have any, they must be in a future I’ll outlive, a future I’ll someday look back on fondly. I confess that I have begun to imagine them. It is a sort of diaphanous fantasy that might harden into a plan. I’ll compose a passionate, moving, grammatically impeccable letter of recommendation extolling myself, appealing to the social conscience of the admissions committee, praising the intelligence and boundless potential of the talented Mlle. Cadeau who has suffered and overcome years of penury and misfortune, who has been tried by life and not found wanting. This magnificent letter will be signed by the once-famous poet and quondam Sorbonne instructor, Emile Rideaux. It will secure me a place at university—and a full scholarship, too. It needn’t be the Sorbonne; I would be content with the Université de Grenoble Alpes. What will I study there? Certainly not pharmacology. I shall apply to the Faculty of Languages and Literature. Then at last Monsieur Rideaux will pass away—peacefully, gratefully, dreaming not of burning fire engines, malicious whores, oriental war, and ruined innocence, but of willing Tahitian girls and anarchism triumphant, of Agnes young and faithful in the shade of palms and pyramids. Then he will have freed me, repaid me, taught me, and through me have fulfilled his dream of raising high the guillotine of love.
I have already written my first three poems.
