NO COMPRENDO THE STRANGER

BY HERVÉ PRUDON
Rue de la Santé

Translated by David Ball

Diary

Paris is a full city. Every morning I empty out my head: It’s like in the country—last day of November—a new blue sky improves—upon acquaintance—with a bare sky—advancing openly emptiness—on a glass tray—sea without spray—sea of ice—and the city disappeared—like in the fields—when time passes—the wind dies down and pain disappears—you take a chair—you sit there—you feel like painting that—nothing oppresses—caresses from beyond …

I’m not going out but I’m not the only one: cocoons, tribes, parties, cells—family cells or others—ghettoes, armored doors, double-paned, triple-locked, padlocked, barricades, everybody standing firm. Nobody moves. To go from my place to the chic neighborhoods, you have to climb on trees, go from branch to branch like the baron in the trees. I’m too acrophobic. Also too claustro to crawl through catacombs. So walk along the asylum, the big prison, the convents and hospitals. Closed spaces. What they call maximum-security areas. Maximum tension. That’s rue de la Santé, from one end to the other. Health Street. The sickest street in Paris.

Iron

It was a fine end of November, abnormally mild. People were swimming in Nice and Biarritz. In some Parisian neighborhoods a vacation mood must have been in the air, the kind of spontaneous fragrance that floods you with pleasure, makes you fall in love, and fills you with bliss in front of a store window or behind a behind. No fragrance like this in other neighborhoods. It wasn’t a good idea to go out today. Outside it was too empty in spots. Real black holes of antimatter. Elsewhere dripping with picturesque. There are days where this city is borderline bipolar. I had zero grams of iron in my blood and I should have known that one way or another this deficiency was going to be turned around—and dangerously so.

In detective novels, demons or buddies always catch up with the guy who has served time: He goes down again, falls again, and dives back into the life again. But like I said, that’s in books. In reality there’s less reality; more things happen inside your head than on the street. Dead things, for example, or old ideas—they don’t have a grave but keep on dying in bits of brain in the unsafe area. All this to say that there are very threatening days when I don’t feel right inside and my life is like an old tape you can’t rewind or even decipher because of the hieroglyphics, belches, obsolete sonnets, postmodern jargon, and intensity levels of collective or individual memory. I needed a technician who could stick his fingers into the softened hard drive of my decomputerized neurons and the visceral tar of my decorticated cortex—not an oncologist. But the vagaries of the medical calendar are such that I had an appointment here, not there, and I couldn’t avoid having to walk the whole length of rue de la Santé. For some it’s a quarantine line, a humanitarian corridor, Social Protection, for others it’s death row. This street stretches out under an infinitely high wall of millstones full of holes like sponges; it’s a street buried alive inside its walls. There I go from jolt to decay.

Health

“A man can live on emotion, doctor, you can’t live on fatigue, you live under it. You can surf on emotion, you’re a flying fish, a land-air missile, but fatigue torpedoes you, it drowns you.”

“Go back home and get some rest.”

“Rest on who, on what?”

“Get out and see people.”

“People? Where am I supposed to go? Into a store window, as a mummy? Sit in a heated sidewalk café between two coat hangers? This city is a frustrating mirage. I never go out, doctor, unless you hand me a summons for medical tests. Outside, on street level, you’re closed in, locked up, walled up. You really want me to go out on the street, this street? In the jolted, ultra-vulnerable state you put me in? This street is a black sword, it goes through me backwards, it tears out my guts and my head, it’s a brutal street, it’s sick and crazy and dangerous. You saw the wall? Fifteen yards high, hundreds of yards long, nothing but big millstones and every single one of them wants to get out of the wall and jump on you. Behind the sticky wall a fucking ferocious neighborhood, a human zoo. An Indian reservation, no reservations necessary. A concentration camp universe. The back room, the rubbish, the unsold items, all the ugliness of the most beautiful city in the world. A secret, private collection where you can find everything that’s wrong. It jumps out at you through the walls. I wasn’t educated in violence, and I still don’t know what side I’m on. There are two sides on rue de la Santé, a wall side and a house side. The two sides clash. Those who have almost everything and those who’ve lost everything. This isn’t a Parisian street and I don’t think it ever goes anywhere.”

I don’t remember what he answered. Move along, there’s nothing to see.

“Rue de la Santé is a slit, a geological fault in the exhibitionist system, the opposite of the Operation Open Doors that the City of Lights is putting on right now. It cuts through the eastern part of the 14th arrondissement from north to south, a neighborhood they call residential, in contrast to commercial. In actual fact a neighborhood of nothing. A place dismissed, like a case dismissed. In the game of Monopoly it does not exist.”

“You’re fixating.”

This street, merry as an exhaust pipe, begins at Val de Grâce (military hospital) and ends on rue D’Alésia (defeat of the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix against the Roman general Julius Caesar) at the intersection with Glacière, rebaptized Place Coluche (French comedian, died on a motorcycle at forty-two, founder of the Restos du Coeur soup kitchens); on the even-numbered side it passes by Cochin (civilian hospital), La Santé (only prison inside Paris), and Sainte-Anne (psychiatric hospital). The blind walls of these institutions, confined there until further notice, face deaf buildings anyone is entitled to find ugly, especially after the elevated line on boulevard Saint Jacques, as you get nearer to the outlying neighborhoods where they’ve built modest and low-income housing. Further up, between Arago and Port-Royal, more historical places—convents and religious or monastic institutions; they conceal their rich, permanent heritage behind cleaned-up walls and clumps of trees.

“I’m not fixating, doctor, life put me in the fix I’m in, I have to stay in my room at one end of the street, it shut me up, it hammered me down, and you’re at the other end, one foot in my grave and the other among the fortunate of the earth. I’m stuck with the whole length of this street that’s locked away behind surrounding walls oozing with misery and pain. Only cemetery walls look that much like the walls of asylums and prisons. You don’t know who these walls separate from whom, the living from the dead, the normal from the abnormal, honest people from criminals, the sick from the healthy, animals from human beings—they separate some from others, that’s all you have to know. All you have to do is imagine that behind the walls it’s more than a zoo, it’s a jungle, Africa, hell, and the ghetto of living. Nobody walks on rue de la Santé, and car traffic is rare. People who live here are invisible, protected by their anonymity. Their children don’t play on the sidewalk. Nobody would get the idea of moving here, facing the walls, except for Samuel Beckett who chose to live right across from the prison. He used to say he’d always be on the prisoners’ side, but most of the prisoners never read Beckett; he lived on the other side of the street, the other side of the walls. The walls have the thickness of reality, but on both sides of the walls life has the consistency of a fantasy. On rue de la Santé you can’t see anything but you can hear voices, groans, and shouts, moans, calls, frenzies, revolts, and death throes. You’re never sure. It’s like being at the edge of a deep forest. It’s like a no-man’s-land, the Mexican border or the Berlin wall. Good happy honest normal people never go near asylums, prisons, or hospitals. They have no idea the centuries-old convents even exist. They don’t know what kind of life is lived there, what vices are practiced, or what types of surprises they’re cooking up for us there.

“Life here is not Parisian, no sidewalk cafés, no shops, no strolling around in the sun. It’s a life of shadows. The banks of the Seine and the Champs-Élysées are elsewhere, but the Seine is a bland sauce and the Champs-Élysées is paved with soft stones. The History of France is declaimed out there, under l’Arc de Triomphe. Paris is a grandiloquent city; it shines but leaves everyone in the dark, and the featherless Gallic Rooster is disguised as a phosphorescent peacock. The history of the French people is no longer written in newspapers or books, it went to sleep somewhere between long ago and formerly, between elsewhere and further away, but rue de la Santé is the bottom you hit before you bounce up again. De Gaulle and Mitterrand were treated in Cochin, all the great criminals made a stay in the prison, and in Sainte-Anne the pathways are called Maupassant, Baudelaire, or Antonin Artaud. Rue de la Santé is a black knife, a cutthroat alley, a cold trench, a fault, a slit, a scar, a short silence, and a draft of cold air. Every particle of air is a piece of shrapnel slashing through your brain. Far from the crowd, the passerby you encounter is an escapee, a survivor on suspended sentence, a jailbird, an abnormal person, or even an anchorite. At any rate a foreigner, not a citizen. He can’t be a tourist, an employee, or a storekeeper. A neighbor, perhaps, but from what side? He can’t ignore you, there’s nowhere he can look, he wants to hug you—or bump you off. He seems to know you, or recognize you. He already saw you in good company when he was in the padded cell, or solitary, or on a gurney, in prayer or in sorrow. It’s not the clash of civilizations, it’s the drift of continents. The guy in front of you is an iceberg in a thick fog. You’re ready to fight to the death, because this is where it’s happening, on rue de la Santé, at last you’re going to battle, after wandering around this fucking snail-shaped city for years without finding your niche—or the exit.”

Camus

“Mom died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. But I know she died today. Or maybe yesterday, I didn’t know. What does it matter? Yesterday, today, dead or not, her or me? Last night I reread Camus’s The Strangerto fall asleep. Result: I didn’t sleep at all. I dreamed that a dog who was allowed to go anywhere was dragging me by the sleeve through the sleaziest places you could think of, dungeons of passing time, the bottoms of which you could never get out of since the social elevator’s broken and the competition is international, I was in a nine-square-yard cell with two other inmates, I was on a hospital bed next to a cancer of the liver, I was like an overmedicated zombie in a cafeteria in Sainte-Anne and the dog was telling me to hurry up, we still had to visit the Catacombs and the Montparnasse cemetery. That dog finally left me alone but I began thinking about our appointment. I really shouldn’t have done that, because I hold you completely responsible for making me come here and then leave without getting anything. It would have been better not to come and not to think about it.

“At 9:30 a.m. I left the house at the last minute to see if I had any mail. There was that letter from the eviction officer about my unpaid rent and the eviction notice. My father died penniless and my mother worse, all alone, she’d even lost her mind. Paris was off limits for her, because of her blood pressure and the high rents. For her, Paris was no way to live. For me, that’s all there was. In the ’60s I’d already burned down all the projects outside Paris with napalm the way cobalt can get rid of your cancer.”

General-in-Chief of the Middle Class

“When I was a kid I always dreamed of the Champs-Élysées, the banks of the Seine, and the Quartier Latin. I lived twenty miles from Paris in low-income housing. My father was general-in-chief of the middle class and a representative of smalltown France. That just shows you he didn’t exist. He used to bike back from the station and into the parking lot in front of the neighbors’ cars and their wives’ windows. Of course he had battle plans and naval maps in his pockets but he wouldn’t spread them out in front of his family who had homework to do or dinner to make. In the ’50s and ’60s the son of a modest wage earner in the southern suburbs could consider a career as a teacher in Paris. Paris was a conquerable citadel. The kind of target you could hit. It seemed to me the right spot for a young man with some French culture to have the firm illusion he’d be living in the center of the world. But it wasn’t a target made of concentric circles, it was more like a spiral with a constantly moving center. The more Parisian I was, the more of a stranger I was. An immigrant. I didn’t even give myself the right to vote, or a work permit. I would settle into apartments without paying the rent until I got evicted. I could always manage to melt into the city, I looked like seaweed, the spitting image of the crowd. I lived by writing and lying; in other words I lived on nothing. Most of the time I lived underwater, in the fog, but with the technique of the flying fish, I had flashes of scintillating lucidity that lead me to say I actually did live. Or at least I think so.”

Impoverishment

“It seemed to me that in the ’70s, as I emerged in Paris, I was reproducing the fate of all humanity, I was like that fish with legs coming out of the ocean and becoming a monkey in a few million years, then a man; I was on dry ground, the promised land. I came from the southern suburbs, I didn’t realize I was leaving that impalpable, infinite, slimy old-people’s home to its economic stagnation and unemployment, hopelessness and mindlessness. I landed at the Porte d’Orléans, and I stuck there, all around Denfert, Montparnasse, and Port-Royal, without ever crossing the Seine. At least back then, the people of the 14th looked middle class and not yet like a bunch of chickenshits sliding into impoverishment. But I didn’t want to be prosperous. I wanted to be Verlaine or François Villon. Verlaine ended his life here, in the hospital neighborhood, going from sleazy hotel to hospice, from the arms of Eugénie Krantz and Philomène Boudin, well-known prostitutes, to the less tender arms of the hospital sisters in their habits.”

Esophagus

“I ended up at Cochin Hospital. Not really ended. Not really continued. I stopped there. The Achard wing is a huge blue thing that would bring anybody down, but from the ninth floor you can look out over all of Paris. At night it looks like the scintillating sea. I had become the ghost of a big crow and I had a rotten egg in my esophagus. A bodyguard never left my side: It was a kind of giraffe or gibbet from which a goiter was hanging, a bladder, a belly heavy from chemotherapy. I also had a syringe on my lap, and in my chest a tube between a vein and pipes through which substances were flowing. Every morning a stretcher bearer would come get me and take me to an ambulance that crossed the city toward the Place Gambetta. In a sci-fi-setting I was bombarded by X-rays to the music of Keith Jarrett. In the big waiting room where a horde of frightened paupers were waiting, I would smoke Craven “A”s while waiting for the ambulance drivers to come back. I no longer thought about downing large quantities of alcohol, I was much calmer. I had no desire to get out of there and into a café, didn’t feel like picking up girls either. I had all I needed, because on the one hand I could see my life like a real thing and not a beautiful piece of fruit, and on the other my life was an object of care for all the people who surrounded me, and that gave it a certain reinforced substance. I was naked in my life but that life was an air cushion. The weight I’d lost was the weight of guilt, bad fat. I felt unbelievably forgiven. Of course I was wrong, but as long as I was in the hospital or even in the ambulance listening to the drivers’ bullshit, I was untouchable—admirably lucid, but only relevant on one side of the wall, nine stories higher than other peoples’ lives.”

Adoration

“I looked out over rue de la Santé—I think I’ve said the main things about it already—and the square courtyard of a little Ursuline convent. At 10 in the morning a window in the building would open and a woman would appear in smiling majesty, and the memory of her majestic smile would accompany me all day through the obedient time at the hospital, for I rediscovered in her slow, secluded life the secret impatience of childhood time, when there is a century from one Christmas to another and two hundred thousand palpitations of the heart between two kisses.

“‘She’s not smiling, she’s making a face,’ my roommate would say. He was really nasty in his unhappiness, and his company was a nasty face behind my back.

“I knew that once I fell out of my observatory down there, driven out of the asylum parenthesis, everything would move very quickly between two fatal accidents and from sequels to metastases, from personal bankruptcy to planetary cataclysm, everything would go bust, irremediably, from day to day for centuries and centuries, with no ritual to consecrate the moment or drunkenness ever again to sublimate it, no surprise would shake up the exhaustion of living when the memory and consolation I had found was erased, not near that Ur-suline nun I couldn’t see very well with my own eyes from so far away, my eyes fucked up by the drugs, but I could have walked at least once barefoot into emptiness halfway to the sky to meet her, barefoot, in pajamas, light, on the invisible tightrope of my desire, even after her arms get tired of opening and sorry that my late lamented desire is worn out and dangles down, defeated by medication and other things in my mental constitution, this being noted well before I was freed from the cancer wards.

“But who was she smiling at twelve months out of twelve all the goddamn day between her four walls and the arcades of her little convent? Was she cloistered there forever? Was she really as I saw her when she stood against the wall in her window frame, Ava Gardner and the Mona Lisa,and if not, then who?

“‘A slut,’ my roommate would say. ‘She’s doing a mouth striptease with her smile.’

“It’s true she’d fucking contaminated me with her smile. All I had to do was think of her crowned with light, her breasts raised and her arms open in a sweeping gesture inaugurating the glorious day, and a smile would spread over my beaming face, remaining between my lips like a sigh of the greatest beatitude. The guy who shared my room was a bad-tempered paranoiac with bipolar tendencies; it made him nervous that I never stopped thinking about her, all mischievous and generous, hence the smile. He didn’t like the idea of me smiling behind his back.

“Not so long ago, when I was nervous too, I felt that time spent doing nothing is blood you’re losing, blood leaving your body. My blood was over there, in the veins of that little nun. Little or big, I don’t know. That’s where life was. Behind the walls. Between four walls and in a bed, in the conversation she has with the world at the intersection of morning and eternity, a certain way of turning the courtyard of a convent on rue de la Santé into the Sahara of Charles de Foucault, and praying there without saying anything and without wasting her time. As for my time, my time for living or not, other people could spend it, think about it, put it to good use. My use of life had been disappointing, especially my own life I mean, I never really managed to live, but if you’ve tried yourself you know it isn’t easy, but I was beginning to hear, in the breathing of the tangible, invisible, and in a word discreet universe—quite unknown, like that Patuyan territory where Lord Jim carved out his fate—something livelier than life, the radar echo of infinitely gentle matter that might welcome me for a while. Things and people we look at stealthily—we steal something from them, as the root word shows, probably a bit of their image, as if we’re surveillance cameras, but why not benevolence cameras? We trust them to lead us, to walk us about, and they embody us, as if that fucking metempsychosis didn’t wait for us to die. We become the dog in the street, the tree waiting for its leaves, the baby bawling in its stroller, and the nun in her room who can’t see you but is probably praying for you, for you to be saved.

“I saved a greeting for her every morning, she would smile her smile, and it all fused together and remained hanging in the air.

“The first days at my window it was passionately sexual, I was lying in wait, feverish and predatory, a generous sperm donor, but what with habit and laziness and a whole lenitive chemistry, it turned into something else: murmuring a sweet song, not breaking crackers anymore, taming a titmouse, leaving the night nurses alone, giving a bit of oneself little by little, day after day—I moved all my hope into the nun’s place across the courtyard, making my nest in her flowerpots and my faith in her catechism, whereas my roommate slit his throat in the communal showers.

“I would not regret our conversations, not because he called me Monsieur Schmaltz or Sister Smiley, but because I had no idea what he was talking about. One day, before opening his mouth, he wrote out a draft of his declaration:

Unless seeing what never seen nor possible to know unimaginableto this day of which one would have to in orderto say other words than always the same ones and thustoday senseless and outdated tomorrow by audiovisualwithout a printer, I do not know what to say, Smiley—inFrench in the original.

“‘No,’ I would say. ‘You don’t always know what to say.’

“‘You don’t always say what you see either, because what you see is unspeakable, in French in the original, right? Schopenhauer can say that the true existence of man is what takes place inside himself, and that in the same environment each man lives in another world, we’re still in the same room, right? So do me a favor, stop smiling. Or you’re gonna get it from me too.’

“‘According to Swami Prajnanpad, one must say yes to everything and when we accept something willingly there is no suffering, and fear must be banished from our lives.’

“‘If I didn’t run a schizophrenic support group in regular life, I wouldn’t feel like I was talking to the wall of an autistic crap-house covered with graffiti smelling sickeningly and sweetly of shit. You put smiles all over this goddamn room, what the hell do you like here?’

“‘Me.’

“‘You remind me of that fucking young mother who smothered her baby and threw him into a pond. The same night she was smiling into the TV cameras claiming someone had stolen her kid. Why was she smiling, huh? Why’re you smiling too? Fuck off, get the hell out of here, you asshole. Dickhead. ’”

Monkeyfish

“Well, he died, that’s life. So everything would have been okay in the hospital if they’d kept me inside their walls; they’d even confiscated my prick so I couldn’t injure myself, so that my temporary impotence was perfectly interlocked with the votive chastity of my Ursuline across the way. I felt more and more like I was sitting inside myself, like a stone in the sand. There was nothing else I had to do. I was born to be there. I was legitimate, like Verlaine.

“Then they gave me a Turk for a neighbor. Or maybe a Kurd. He was no poet. I didn’t understand a thing he said, but when he didn’t say anything he looked dead.

“And when he died he had a smile that looked like me. I wondered why this Turk or Kurd had come to die in the 14th.

“I told you about the fish with legs who became a monkey and then man, but I didn’t tell you about his dismay when he understood, with his great intelligence, that the dry or promised land was not the center of the world. The center of the world had changed places in the meantime. From then on it was submerged, or Chinese, or somewhere in the suburbs of the world, in the anonymity of forgotten, tiny, unconscious lives, protozoan small fry. So all the monkeyfish could do was go back to the ocean, wherever the currents carried it, but it no longer knew how to swim or breathe in the water. That’s why we can see it on the strand, that strip of wet sand between the beach and the ocean, it talks to seashells and hears Apollinaire’s line: And the single string of the sea trumpets… It paces around without knowing if it’s time to get wet or dry. You really don’t want to keep me here, doctor, the way you’ve seen me, do you?”

“I’m a gastroenterologist, not a psychiatrist. I can see you’re a depressive, but you’re not the only one and beds are hard to come by. Your colon looks okay, your stomach has definitively found its spot in the mediastinum, and aside from the problem of anemia, you’re in perfect health. I don’t want to see you here anymore. Next time, go see your primary caregiver. You had an operation ten years ago, that’s old news, and you still keep coming to see us. You live next door? You’re just dropping by like a neighbor? You moved into a boarding house across the street?”

“Across the street there’s a convent. And your nearest neighbors are jailbirds and insane people. I live further away in a new neighborhood where the lower middle class lives. I feel like I’m my father, but unlike me he didn’t have debts and he paid his rent.”

“Good. What did your father do?”

“He biked every morning and evening to the station and back, but I’m walking back.”

“Don’t get caught in the demo with your dickhead and your wobbly legs. It’s the firemen against the CRS riot police; things are going to heat up. And call me this evening for the results of the biopsy.”

Farewell

I went back up to see my room. It had no smell anymore. The moron who’d slit his throat ten years back was there, he’d come back again, all sewed up, in bed, in bad shape. He didn’t want my compassion, and he didn’t even recognize me. I went up to the window to take a look at the convent. Veiled Ursulines were walking around the courtyard, I didn’t know which one was mine. They never went outside, or very rarely. A little like me. We were not fated to meet. On the other side over the rooftops you could see the Eiffel Tower as if it were brand new.

Genocide

Once I was outside I backed up. I crossed the boulevard and I went and sat down in a garden of the Observatory. From there I could see Sacré-Coeur, but between the big hill of Montmartre and that part of Montparnasse, there sits all of Paris: In the mist, it wasn’t much. And to think I’d wanted to stick something up the ass of this fucking city. Walls, houses, and behind the walls of the houses, heads, and in each head other walls, dollhouses, makeup, and monkey-dreams—that’s all there was.

I was mad at myself for not being in good shape. I’d been afraid of a relapse and my body had become an irresponsible mechanism.

I say eternal words to myself with no substance, fine day, bare sky, the blue transparent skin of emptiness, the trembling of the air, the border of absence, rue de la Santé, Health Street, the health of the street. So everything is in everything else? But I am in nothing. Isolating, escaping, thinking against the grain, alone, thinking Tao, sparrow and Tao, not acting, no longer moving, until the reality test.

That’s when that first corpse came into the picture. I heard myself saying: He’s dead, that’s life. There was no border between him and me. I had already thought all that about someone I loved, or maybe not, or else someone with wings, or crawling, or an inanimate object. A household robot? No doubt FN, French Norms, I have always been faithful to French Norms, even to my smallest whim.

I am a man of quality,I said aloud, French quality, a creation of national craftsmanship. Not a top-of-the-line product, but not supermarket junk. I am a “cultural exception” in the French sense, except for the fact that there’s nothing exceptional about me. Perfectly average. It seems to me the corpse is sitting on the bench and I’m sitting on my ass. I have no other spiritual base but my own bottom, bottomless anyway, ever since I got sick, but that’s the base I’m talking from, right? To the walls, to the dead.

I stir thoughts with the pins and needles in my legs. Maybe they’re the pins that stir my thoughts. They think in German, like strategists, they hold me very straight in my boots, like Bismarck. But I’m going to take French leave, like the Invisible Man. I may think like a strategist but I still act like a wanderer. I wander standing still. I have this corpse on my hands, it’s hard to get away from it. He’s a young man and I find him touching. What should I do? Administer first aid? Aid yourself first. Wait for help, some clarification, after which I could kiss this episode goodbye and enjoy the benefits of resilience? This city is dead and inhabited by corpses. Even the leaves of the chestnut trees are dead. The wind growls at the big trees and the rain’s teeth are chattering on the surface of the Fontaine des Quatre-Mondes. A leaf falls on my nose, soft and wet, dead. An actual slug coming out of my nose. I’m more or less in the same state of dismayed stupor as the day I was excluded from the Great Competition of Floral Poetry because I shat in my pants before the official jury.

At present, through a shining rain, I am distressed to see a young man next to me on the bench all slumped down with his shoulders hacked to pieces by a machete, and just five minutes ago he was telling me with a smile and flawless teeth about his reasoned ambition to live here in France, the land of welcome—a young, practically French-speaking friendly Rwandan who lived, from what I could glean from his damned gobbledygook, in the dorms of the Cité Universitaire and wanted to give up his studies in Paris. He had met a girl he liked, someone of the same culture and status, and his temporary job as an interpreter for tourists on the Bateaux-Mouches was enough for him to begin integrating into society, while he waited. Waited for what? I said to him. Waited to get old? He had Camus’s The Strangerin his pocket, that asshole. It’s funny. When you read The Stranger, you always think you’re Meursault, the one who kills, the one who thinks, and never the Arab who dies like an asshole. If I were the general-in-chief of smalltown France I wouldn’t have been very proud of myself. A guy asks someone for a cigarette, the other guy’s a nonsmoker, so the first guy persists, walks away and comes back with a machete, and hacks the guy to pieces. No comprendo. I hadn’t seen the danger coming, I didn’t sense that the enemy offensive was coming around the Maginot Line either. But after all, we don’t have eyes on our backs. On our backs we have wings, right?

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re still acting in shitty films?”

“I write books,” she said. “I’m the new Virginia Woolf.”

I shouldn’t have been there in the Closerie des Lilas, a stone’s throw from Cochin and the Observatory. Famous writers had come to this brasserie, then their ghosts, finally plaques on the tables in memoriam and finally fat men smoking cigars and skeleton women coughing away.

The last time I saw the woman facing me was twenty years ago and the shitty film was a time in my life, not a masterpiece they show in the cinematheque. I should go back home along rue de la Santé with my eyes closed and lock myself up at my place. Last time, I’d managed to make her laugh with Parisian gossip, that red-haired slut in leopard tights. Maybe I had intrigued her, maybe not. I gave her a hard-on, what else can I say. I had a furious beast between my legs, a famished tiger. She looked like an elegant scarecrow at the time and now like an epileptic mummy. She was always smoking little foul-smelling cigars and she used to laugh loudly but without gaiety or any reason to laugh, aside from me. She drank large quantities of beer. Ten or twenty years ago—the last time—she was already a former dancer, or a former model, and a former American too. She already had an impressive length of service in a whole bunch of fields. She didn’t speak French very well and wasn’t listening to what I was saying. She didn’t want to listen to just anything. She was in a rush to live and now in even more of a rush, in a state of emergency really, except with me. It was as if for ten or twenty years she’d been recharging her battery and I’d emptied mine. I had absolutely no desire to be sitting across the table from her. If I could have chosen a female companion I would rather have chosen a dead woman, or one with Alzheimer’s, a mischievous little madwoman, inoffensive, hesitant, stammering, out of it, with gestures and signs of affection from another era. I was not unhappy to have left my cock in the cloakroom. I had nothing under the table that could have given me a hard time; under the table there were only cigarette butts that nobody would have thought of lighting.

I had set foot in a place I shouldn’t have, onto the other side of the boulevard. In the space of a hundred yards I’d gone through the 5th and 6th arrondissements, whereas that night I had dreamed that I belonged to the middle middle class, you know, the one people say is neither more nor less. So in that dream I was walking my dog, a ghost dog, without hurrying, and the dog starts pulling on his leash, he crosses through Sainte-Anne from rue d’Alésia to the elevated subway, then he scratches at the little metal door of the prison and he goes sniffing out sickness in the crowded ER of Cochin, as if he’s looking for something or someone. Not at all. He’s just trying to get rid of me among the crazies, the jailbirds, and the dying. He makes me go through the revolving door of the Closerie des Lilas, pulls me up to a lady with bright red hair and leopard tights, then leaves through the same revolving door and makes me wander out onto rue Campagne-Première, a street Godard used in Breathless. He bites the ass of the stone lion on Place Denfert, plunges into the catacombs, and to finish things off, to finish meoff, he raises his leg on me. I wake up all pissy, sticky, sweaty, in a lukewarm smell that makes your stomach heave and breaks your heart, and makes you cry pissy, sticky floods of tears, it’s the smell of chemotherapy embalming you and profaning you while you’re still alive, I’m stretched out on a bed in a white room and the dog’s not there anymore, he must be sniffing around the Montparnasse cemetery behind the high gray walls, looking for a concession. That’s the kind of polytraumatising dream I came in for. But the worst is still to come: A doctor throws me out of the room saying I’m a simulator. Go figure Parisian life!

Sure thing. Everybody’s more Parisian than I am. The whole world is Parisian. The Chinese woman who makes little Eiffel Towers in the depths of Shanxi and the illegal Malian who sells them on the sidewalks of Quai Branly, the interpreter of Albert Camus or Jacques Derrida, and the French cancan dancer who raises her leg around Hamburg. Nothing is more Parisian than the Mona Lisaand yet she’s Italian, that Mona Lisa. My Parisianism isn’t worth a damn. I haven’t left the 14th arrondissement for ten years, the only one on the Left Bank through which the Seine does not flow.

“You are absurd,” the woman writer said to me.

“I am a stranger, a foreigner. I’ll never make it back home. Besides, I got an eviction notice.”

“So you’re not paying for my drink?”

“Not paying for your glass, not screwing your ass, we got no class.”

“Fuck off, you asshole, you dickhead, get the hell out of here.”

Honorable Exit

Reread this in Lord Jimin the bookstore next door:

We are only on sufferance here and got to pick our wayin cross lights, watching every precious minute and everyirremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go outdecently in the end—but not so sure of it after all—andwith dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbowswith right and left.

Less courage than indifference. Does all that really concern me?

“What?” asked the bookseller.

“Me, the eviction officer, the biopsy. What’s the use? When my mother died she wasn’t in her right mind anymore, but if she had been, what could I have done with her mind? And my children … what the hell do they care about the biopsy, the eviction officer, and me? When China opened its economy to the free market, it led to the biggest exodus from the provinces human history has ever known. Young Indian women work sixteen hours a day in export industries for a salary of fifteen euros a month. In the same month a model or a soccer player makes a million euros.”

“Are you buying the book?”

“No, I don’t buy anything anymore.”

Rue de la Santé

I humbly returned to the 14th arrondissement. As long as I was on boulevard de Port-Royal I was in the sun, broad-shouldered, with my head held high despite the humiliations of my constitution, but the end of rue de la Santé came down on me like a notch in a tomahawk, I turned off into that gorge, Little Big Horn. On my left the good guys, on my right the bad. So it was kind of hard for me not to zigzag, stagger, and go bumping from a wall to a gate, from a sentry to an intercom. Good thing I don’t walk by the prison every day, because I can’t help going inside to see my son who happens to be housed there through the fortunes of life, and he doesn’t like me to come see him all the time in the visiting room looking as if I want to get him out of there. When he sees me he always has that dismayed look he had when he opened his Christmas present under the tree—a nice book, when he was counting on a PlayStation, latest generation.

He knows very well that I don’t like knowing he’s in there, but he also knows very well I don’t like knowing he’s somewhere else. In short, I’ve never known what to do with the big guy since the day he was born. He’s a boy who has no problem telling good from evil, but claims that the former is more harmful than the latter, and the promoters of universal good have created more victims than the devotees of dirty tricks. In other words, he says the Crusades, the Inquisition, Communism, and colonialism have been more generously murderous in good faith and in the name of God’s law or man’s than a handful of rascals fearing neither God nor man.

“Why’d you come here, Dad?”

“I was in the neighborhood, passing by, son.”

“You’re sick? It’s your cancer?”

“Don’t worry, boy.”

“I’m not worrying, Dad. I’m inquiring, that’s all—you’re hanging in there.”

“I’m holding up, big guy.”

“I don’t see what hold-up you’re talking about, Dad.”

“We’re talking man to man, son, it does you good.”

“The trouble with you, Dad, is that you talk when there’s nothing to say, and you don’t say anything when I ask questions.”

“I don’t have all the answers, big guy, you don’t get answers just like that.”

“You never saw the sunny side of life.”

“And you did?”

“I’m going my way, and you’ve always been in the street. You’re the man in the street, Dad, a nobody. Nobody pays any attention to you.”

“How do you like it here? Good food?”

“I’m fine here, Dad, nobody can kick me out and nobody wants to take my place.”

“You’re pretty smart, the way things are now. People lose their jobs, can’t pay the rent anymore, their wife cuts out on them, their boys sell drugs and their girls sell their ass, all of them end up homeless, young, old—forty-eight percent of the French are afraid of becoming homeless. You got a cushy place here, don’t screw around with me.”

“Life isn’t rosy every day, Dad. The National Committee on Ethics reports that prison is a place of regression, despair, violence done to oneself, and suicide. The suicide rate is seven times higher than in the general population.”

“You know, boy, like I say, it’s not exactly all brotherly outside either. Here, at least you’re with people of your own kind. It’s like in Cochin or Sainte-Anne, or the Ursuline Convent. You see your mother?”

“No.”

“Well, I saw her on TV, on a literary show. It seemed to be going good for her: She had nice bright red hair and panther-skin tights. She was testifying about her orgasms, but nothing that could have incriminated me.”

“Hey, while you’ve got your mouth open, you’re gonna do me a favor. Not that I want to boss you around, but … you know the yellow café further down, right next to the boulevard, at the metro stop?”

“I know it without knowing it, it’s not my hangout.”

“The waiter there, his name is Willy, ask him for the package I gave him, and stash it away for the time being.”

“The time being of what?”

“That’s all, Dad, stop your bullshit.”

It’s amazing how much self-confidence this boy has now. A guy who used to give up his turn on the slide to other kids, I see him walking away, towering over the guards by a head. A kind of sun king. Well, a sun locked away in the shade. But with global warming, maybe that’s not such a bad place for it to be for the time being.

“For the time being of what?”

“You can do time without being, dickhead,” the guard answered me. “Get the hell out of here, asshole.”

Once I’m outside, I stare life in the face and I don’t see myself in it and a kind of perplexity takes hold of me, in fact a feeling of melancholy like that twinge of sorrow I used to feel when I dropped off my son, or was it his sister, with the woman who took care of them, a fine woman no doubt, often very easy-going, but certainly perverse.

Come to think of it, I’ve always abandoned my children. I left them with an inheritance of insecurity; insecurity isn’t bad, for someone who likes surprises. One day he’ll have his PlayStation. If I had the money I’d buy him one right away, I’d send him a package. But I don’t have any money, I don’t want any, I don’t deserve any. If I wanted money it wouldn’t be around here. Here, people not only have everything, they know how to use it too. They even know how to use you. They would even use my boy, if he was of any use whatsoever.

Packing Tape

The prison wall seemed even higher and longer than it had on the way there, or else the sky seemed lower.

It was 1 o’clock when I walked back under the elevated train. The café was crowded, Africans eating pink spaghetti twisted in a heap on their plate like handfuls of complicated neurons. People often think Africans are cheerful, but these were sad. It was only the owner who was merry—a red-haired white woman, with zebra-striped tights—she danced behind the counter. I think she was missing half her teeth but I could only see with one eye because of the smoke. I asked for Willy in a low voice, as if I were coming on to him.

I laboriously explained my business to this Willy, who didn’t answer because, as the boss confided to me, he’d had his vocal cords slit in Kigali, in 1994. Willy listened to me, staring straight into my eyes as if I were finally confessing that I was responsible for the massacre of his family and his whole people, as the commander-in-chief of the French army that protected the Hutu militia who murdered 800,000 Tutsis with machetes and screwdrivers. The manager seemed to agree, she wasn’t laughing anymore either. Willy disappeared and came back with a package wrapped up with tape. He put the package in a plastic envelope and then in a Nicolas wine-bottle bag. He put it on the bar and again I thought of my boy unwrapping his presents under the Christmas tree. It seemed polite to order a beer and buy one for Willy, but the manager said fuck off, asshole, we’ve had enough of you.

“Yeah, we had enough of you,” Willy echoed. “Fuck off or I’ll gut you like a chicken.”

I thought my guts had been emptied out already but I didn’t get into an argument.

Episode

I went back by crossing through Sainte-Anne. It’s a shortcut, and a peaceful walk. You’d think it was a big convent with its tennis courts, archways, statues of men on horseback (or not), a romantic garden, and a decent cafeteria with reasonable prices. My daughter is a performer there sometimes. It took her a long time to find her way. When she was thirteen she became introverted and anorexic and I really thought she would become a nun, but that’s when she came back to us with bright red hair and a black mouth, fishnet tights and parachute boots. She was inseparable from her girlfriend Fred who had the same deadly pale gargoyle face tattooed with aggressive devils and pierced from eyebrows to lips with square-headed nails. Which is why, when Fred jumped out of the fourteenth floor across from our apartment, first I thought I saw the two of them together, but I was seeing double at that time anyway. Now I see clearly, I see simply, I see things the way they are. I think my daughter was the one who pushed Fred, the way you push away your evil genius. So my daughter wasn’t so crazy, but she was crazy enough to be locked up in an asylum with a room kept for her here for the last five years.

“No such thing as crazy,” she said to me last time. “I’m paranoid because of you. I was unable to sublimate my homosexual desire, which you never recognized, into a social drive. You never accepted Frederique as my sister because then your attraction to her would have been incestuous.”

“I wasn’t her father.”

So we sort of had an interesting discussion, I mean it went way beyond the disgusted faces and monosyllabic yells our father-daughter dialogue had been reduced to. At the time she was part of a theater group in her psychiatric hospital. If there had been an audience she would have turned her back on it, and if she’d had a script to recite she would have watched out for spying ears. But there was no script, no audience, just a director, who in fact didn’t have a stage. Nonetheless, my daughter had found her way and if some might say it was a dead-end street, what could they say about their own way? I really felt like consoling my daughter and telling her that her little dead-end was finer than the widest highways. I knew where I could find her, she usually hid behind big trees to throw stones at the birds. I don’t look anything like a bird and yet when she saw me she screamed and threw a handful of big pebbles. I think she recognized me. At least she recognized a man. A potential rapist: She hates that. That’s the way she’s been, especially since her nonpsychiatric episode a year ago. She was doing better, she’d gone back to school and even found a temp job as a cashier to pay for it since I was unemployed at the time, but the boss kept telling her she was a dumb jerk and a fat bitch and a fat jerk, all day, behind his mustache, so she quit that job to become a temp prostitute and that disgusted her, that masculine promiscuity, the disrespect for the human person and the assault on feminine dignity.

As for me, I wasn’t so brave. I retreated, and when I turned around I couldn’t see her anymore, but the tree was shaken and trembling. The tree was going into convulsions and howling dickhead, asshole, get the fuck out of here, go roll in your shit. A psychiatrist took me by the arm, dislocating my shoulder, and I asked him if there were any rooms free. That cracked him up, because they were emptying the mental hospitals to fill the prisons. I thought of the policy of family entry and settlement and I felt like going back home.

I left the walls of the hospital thinking about my father, the general-in-chief of the middle class, who never knew his grandchildren, but always had faith in social progress and the great chain of being. He also used to say you had to get a good education, be equipped for life without killing yourself, and find a nice cushy job in the public sector.

Others

I hadn’t done anything to improve my anemia. I didn’t even know if I’d had a biopsy in Cochin or a bio-psych in Sainte-Anne. This kind of word problem could torment me, unsettle me to the max. I never should have walked on my head. A bunch of young hoods saw my weakness right away: “You sick, or you dead already? What were you doing with the crazies? Why’re you hanging out in front of the prison? Why don’t you go home?” They called me a dirty Frenchman; they must have been Arabs or blacks, I have a problem with colors. I said I had indeed passed by the hospital, the convent, the asylum, and the prison, and I’d heard the walls crying, but I hadn’t seen anything. There’s nothing to see on rue de la Santé. Nowhere. I could have walked by shop windows, brasseries, and cafés, I still wouldn’t have seen anything. There might’ve been bright lights, they might’ve been laughing in there, oh yes, but I would’ve walked on. I’m broke, nothing to sell nothing to give. I’m tired. When I go out I get claustrophobic. Outside not at home. At home’s bigger than outside. This city is a dead city the way a language is a dead language. Obsolete. Nothing is alive. People are thinner and thinner. They have the thickness of a light jacket, of spandex tights, jeans with holes in them, or a DVD. I tell these young assholes I can’t hear them, I can’t see them, I don’t even know if they’re there every day, dealing, hassling people, waiting while waiting for life to wait for them. Life doesn’t wait for anyone. They don’t exist. They’re sub-shits.

I tell them that because Hassan, the gardner, is behind me with a big pitchfork and he’s strict about the rules. He doesn’t like to see pre-delinquents smoking in his garden, sleeping on his lawns, or challenging honest passersby.

“You okay?” he asks me.

I don’t tell him I’m just out of the hospital, he doesn’t give a shit. I tell him I’m okay. He tells me about the garden. I don’t give a shit. I wonder what the teenagers are thinking. They’re not thinking, they’re waiting, they push things out of their way. I don’t know what Arabs think either, you never know what they’re thinking, they don’t think, they pray. Hassan gardens while he prays, maybe he prays while he’s gardening. Who knows. I don’t know what women think either—they talk, but do they think what they’re saying or say what they’re thinking? And when they think they don’t think about me but about Brad Pitt or George Clooney, I can tell. I don’t call that thinking. Anyway, my aggressors aren’t black or Arab or young, just morons. You have no idea what morons are thinking. A wild boar, a tiger or a snake, even a mosquito, you can imagine, but a moron? He thinks about himself. He doesn’t think of others. I don’t think of others either, but at least I try to think for others. I hear the walls crying. I don’t piss on prison walls, I don’t tag the walls of hospitals. Suddenly I realize I’m in Hassan’s arms, like an old fag crying his eyes out. It’s the anemia. Seems it dilates the tear ducts. Hassan is extremely embarrassed because he’s a modest, reserved man.

“You should go home.”

I tell him the kids are blocking my way. He drives them away with the back of his hand, like flies. You’d think he’d done that all his life, driving young assholes away like flies. I know them, he says, they’re not really bad. I blurt out that’s exactly what I tell my children about wild boars, snakes, and tigers, they’re not bad, but that being said, it is not unpleasant to see a fence, a wall, an ocean, and a few virgin forests between them and you.

The teenagers are threatening me behind Hassan’s back, they’re cursing me out, they’re cursing my mother and my children to the seventh generation, they’re saying they’re going to whip my ass. In their pants they have either fat dicks or huge knives, but it’s the same humiliation of my human person.

“Leave him alone, he’s crazy in the head,” one of them says. “Go finish yourself off,” he says to me. “We don’t play with dead people.”

“Don’t listen to them,” says Hassan. “They’ll play with anything.”

Elevator

In the elevator a neighbor, blocked breathing, impenetrable face. He looks at me while looking somewhere else. It’s almost like we’re turning our backs on each other while forcing ourselves into a merciless face-to-face confrontation. He looks around thirty, with a fresh, pink complexion. Each new generation is an invasion, a recent wave of immigration trying not so much to integrate into society as to disintegrate me. We have nothing to say to each other and we don’t say it. Well well, he has a little pimple on his lip, that’s normal. One, two, three, four, the floors go by without saying what they’re hiding like the walls on rue de la Santé. The neighbor doesn’t bat an eyelash. Me neither. I look at the pimple on his lip. Our bodies are close. There is nothing between us. As I say that, I don’t know if I mean that nothing separates us or that we have nothing in common between us. I can see his face as if he were an enormous sphinx, or the Mona Lisa, every detail, but a huge mystery. I don’t particularly believe in the existence of God but the existence of man remains to be proven. A lot of absence in all that. I have an urge to poke his pimple to verify its material existence. The elevator stops at the sixth floor and the neighbor gets out, says goodbye. No smile. Fuck him, that asshole.

Waiting for What?

Home. It’s on the last floor; above that, there’s the sky. I feel like I’m on vacation here, in transit—away from the world and life. I’m closer to the sky than to the street. The world is locked out. I see the world on TV, it has the consistency of a plasma screen, nice colors, and often there’s background music to muddle up the commentary.

I was wrong to go out. Without the French medical-social system that provides access to free care, I never would have left home, given the price of the scan, the fibro test, the colon test, the ultrasound, and a friendly word of advice.

“You sure took your time,” says Sarah. “What’d you do?”

“When? Nothing.”

(It’s true almost nothing you might as well say little and badly done but after all far away means almost and in a bad way but after all hidden elsewhere or else hidden here crouching inside but disaffected like totally devitalized so this evening nothing more, no thanks, I’m full, a few more steps yes preferably in town without the seasons coming down with the noise and the back of the crowd and the back of the walls and already come back to sleep no doubt or eat to talk a little alone or not watch television and then turn it off and say something always the same thing about finally going to sleep before getting a cold from a window that’s not closed well or shade from a tree there outside night pain and fear of giants first then dwarfs and all kinds of flying and crawling insects in great numbers and a foreign language but not more than a hasty translation than the idea you have of it now furtive with cloud and whirlwind so to be grabbed with a certain precaution before making honey from it on the contrary from your surroundings shapes and noise in the house maybe joyfully but still sort of always the same thing joyful toothless that is pretty little might as well say almost nothing next to two bumblebees in the left ear and the right ear and a sty on your eye first and then deafness and glaucoma the next day and stiffness of the hands and feet and the mouth and lights out of love to the disgust with moving and saying the essential minimum not to mention vain naïve pain and fatigue because well all that why again what can you say if not to warn once again about what whoever didn’t already happen every day and before days of a necessary or optional absence or presence for the proper functioning of the troops or the end of hostilities how to know without foreseeing the ability to worry or despair generating reactions of joy explosions of hatred but I should be asleep already gone to or remained asleep here or there in the same state of a dead or ignorant ignored thing.)

“Nothing? No news is good news. Did you buy some wine at the Nicolas store?”

“Meursault.”

“What’s that package wrapped up with tape?”

“It was in my mailbox this morning. It must be the iPod you ordered on eBay for Chloe’s birthday.”

“Cool! Did you see my leopardskin tights?”

“You dyed your hair again?”

“Yes, to relax a little. I went to the bank because of that business of unpaid rent, it’s a crazy story.”

“It’s always a crazy story.”

“We’ve never been so alone, fused together in the same madness,lost in a world that has the consistency of a fantasy, it worriesus to death.I read that in a book by Dardenne, I’m going to write something about it.”

“You’re lucky you can still write.”

(As for me, all I’m good at is waiting for the results of the biopsy. It’s like waiting for a verdict. Ten years, twenty years? A few weeks? And at the same time I don’t give a damn. Nothing I can do about it. The die is cast.)

“Where are the kids?”

“Julien’s at his PlayStation and Chloe’s sleeping over at her girlfriend’s.”

(I have no power over their lives. Here or not here, same thing. I floundered around all day whereas the street was straight. I screwed around, I nearly, I don’t know what I nearly did, I nearly did something I didn’t do I didn’t smile enough, I looked pissed off all day, not what you call an honorable exit.)

“When do you get the results?”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Talk louder, I’m in the shower.”

Nobody pays attention to me with my dickhead and my asshole. The world turns. Women blossom. China is catching up with the rest of the world. I go out without waiting. Waiting for what?

Closing Time

It’s cold, night. Rue d’Alésia, deserted. Shutters closed. Bar-tabac shop lit up. I’m in the café at the very bottom of rue Gla-cière and rue de la Santé, the light in the jailhouse is diffuse at night, it isn’t lit. Walls eat up the blackness of the sky. Anemic streetlights shining very weakly on the barbed wire. The street is full of murders, fits of madness, creeping illnesses, and a whole planned contagion. The threat of an epidemic, gangrene. Dirty tricks. Everything is maintained there, a shadow zone, like a nuclear power plant. You have the feeling something’s going to happen, finally.

I’m reading a crime book by Albert Camus. Reading and writing for oneself and not counting on other people is a way of being French, being a zero from A to Z. So I’m reading TheStranger. I am that stranger. It’s a way of being out of it, being here by chance, in transit.

“Get out of here,” the manager says. “We’re closing up. You’ve read enough, dickhead.”

“I’m finishing the page, boss.”

I took a step, one step, forward. And this time, without getting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it up to me inthe sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a longflashing blade cutting at my forehead … My whole beingtensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. Thetrigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; andthere … is where it all started.

The light went out, the café closed. Everything closed. I finished living for the day. I’ll never know what began.