Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  The new reader has an hour while the baby sleeps. She should clean, she should eat something, she should answer e-mails, above all she should sleep herself. But as she climbs heavily into the unmade bed her hand reaches out as though of its own volition to pick up the hardcover she’d closed far too late the previous night. No bookmark, her finger finds the exact place she left off, the book springs open there of its own accord. Settling into a sleeping position except for her neck crooked uncomfortably against the headboard, telling herself she’ll just read a couple of pages before sleep takes hold of her. It is not a novel, it is not a book of poems, it is a book including poems but not of them. She reads a poem—if by read we mean passes her eyes over words and sounds them in her mind, subvocalizes them in her throat. The poem is a page long in French and a page long in English and she reads both versions with similar incomprehension. She is or will be the new reader but she is tired tired tired. It is enough for her in her tiredness to sound the language, to ring each word with the little muffled mallet of her tongue, though her lips don’t move. The new reader is happy on the surface of words; like her baby she does not think to open the plain or colorful box with the toy inside, but the box itself is her toy. And yet with repeated scannings the box begins to fray; roughly handled a seam splits here and there and something can be heard rattling and jingling underneath. Not the poem, now, but her reading of the poem, and not that either; her misreading, for without quite meaning to the French is becoming English: Sur mon crâne incliné plante son drapeau noir becomes sermon crane inclination plants on Japannoir, that’s not a word but it ought to be, she thinks drowsily, early Kurosawa, Mifune in a cheap suit, tormented gunsel, there’s a word that ought to be in a poem, gunsel, like Hansel and Gretel in one body. Is it the new reader who thinks these thoughts or does she occupy a space, a moment, through which these thoughts can pass? Her eyelids getting heavy, the book heavy on her chest, the spine pressing into her sternum, the poem pressing into the wet receptive meshwork of her brain handing off consciousness to unconsciousness, to networks of association, cells associated with rapidly dwindling exterior senses (but her upper lip itches and she must scratch it), rapidly approaching interior ones, recombinant memories, sensory data attached by the slenderest and most mysterious of threads to strong emotions, fear envy lust hatred deprivation anxiety depression curiosity punctuated by outspread patchwork joy. She is sinking and rising, held back by the certain knowledge of the baby’s waking, like a balloonist hanging on to a stray rope—in another moment she’ll be too high to let go, she’s in it for the duration, till the short sharp shock of her plummet to earth, but for now gravity’s reversed itself, and on her mind’s eye certain images are imprinted:

  Ben’s face ten years younger, shining below her white belly as he meets her eyes, his mouth on her cunt.

  The face of the man she’d always thought of as her father, lined and white as his thin straggling hair, glasses folded and unused on the bedside table, deflated body pillowed on a white sheet stained slightly yellow, masked by plastic and oxygen and doubt, this man she’d loved a stranger to her in more than one way.

  A figure in a white robe and hood, masked as though for carnival with a long terrifying nose that curves out like a sinister albino banana, leading her through a riotous crowd by the hand, turning back to glance at her as it pulls her into an alleyway, its face a blade, pulling her hands up to its chest where she feels breasts.

  The view out her backyard one night two winters ago when she was pregnant, hand on her belly, looking out at the moonlit snow where a single brown rabbit squatted transfixed in her view till she tapped once on the glass and it spasmed, it hopped, in elemental terror it vanished.

  The new reader is sleeping. Her baby is crying. The new reader fights her way up through layers and layers of perfect white sheets on which words are printed, words in elegant typefaces, unreadable, like words that Internet bots come up with to detect other bots, that only humans can pierce, words masked by static, by gridlines, by nonsense.

  May sixty-eight. A legendary inscription. As if the floor of the sea had swapped itself with dry land and all the usual creatures—students, cops, judges, booksellers, waiters—had been replaced by their deep-sea analogues: seahorses, sea urchins, sea-snakes, sea-lions. Exactly the same underneath, but our skins were radiant and new. The elements had shifted.

  Those of us who were not political—I especially, a lump of Alsatian clay—nevertheless had to learn how to swim in the political. It was not the air we breathed but something more fundamental—the water we swam in. I sprouted gills, my hands were like fins, from any situation I could wriggle my back and be free. Yes there was music and yes there were drugs. But it was, as I say, water. It had to flow somewhere, and we flowed with it, oblivious to the truth: that water will always seek the lowest possible point. I was in love. Not with a woman, but with Charles, my flatmate. He was the shark who taught me how to swim. Lost in my classes, dreaming through the studio hours, I occasionally drifted south to the Sorbonne to attend a lecture that I had heard my otherwise aloof classmates buzzing about: for the most part incomprehensible talks on Marx, on psychoanalysis, on revolutionary consciousness. On a rainy afternoon I crept in steaming to a darkened amphitheater, a vast, overheated space in which it seemed hundreds of bodies were slumbering. At the bottom of the amphitheater the tiny figure of the professor strutted back and forth, while overhead, on a rippling screen, images of statuary flickered into being and disappeared, one by one. The lecturer was saying something about the decline of the Greek spirit; I was fascinated by his big belly, a brilliant white convexity at the center of his abstract figure, and the gleam of his spectacles as he stepped in and out of the path of the projector. There was a haze of smoke in the room, not all of it tobacco. I stumbled into the first empty seat I could find and was immediately confronted with a glowing roach, handed to me from my left. That was Charles. In the sunshine breaking through the massy clouds afterward I was stunned by his beauty: the waving honey hair he wore nearly to his shoulders, the clarity of his skin (myself a mass of pimples and scars), and the way he wore his T-shirt and Levis on his long, sloping body—he was always leaning against something, hips cocked, looking like one of those Greek statues that the lecturer had just been going on about, one whose armlessness seems integral to its beauty. I had seen him before, in the hallways outside the ateliers at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: he read philosophy but came to art school to score: he said the art students always knew how to find the best hash and they appreciated (said with an unnervingly straight face) his own efforts at consciousness-raising: you artists, he said companionably, you’re such dopes, Plato was right to be suspicious of you. And as our friendship began to unfold, I began to understand how very much further from the center of things I was than I had suspected. His friendliness, his openness, seemed genuine and ironic at the same time. Certainly he acted by conviction, for he was a Marxist, the sort that spoke scornfully of the “official” Communists and glowingly of Castro and Che; I meanwhile was unmistakably a product of the working class, or even lower, so that I must have had as much glamour for him as he had for me. He asked me endless questions about the oppression I had suffered at the hands of the state and the Church. I did my best to oblige him, but I could tell he found my stories disappointing. When I tried to tell him about my benefactor, Father Juneau, he refused to listen until I told him Father Juneau was homosexual. Of course, he said, smiling, all those priests are faggots. That’s all right then. I understand it all. What he understood, or thought he understood, I didn’t dare ask after that.

  I had only known Charles for a week before I found myself living with him: for a flat he had to himself the entire, barely furnished floor of a crumbling former hotel on the Rue de Mézières. All the walls that weren’t load-bearing had been knocked down (Charles had knocked them down himself, and proudly showed me the sledgehammer); it was a vast open space out of which Charles sometimes composed rooms with paper curtains t
hat aped Japanese screens but were closer to the ward dividers in a hospital. Every Saturday he would rise late and groom himself in front of the full-length mirror he kept near his bed; then in just his shorts or sometimes nothing at all lead himself through a series of exercises, based I think on yoga but largely invented by himself. Sometimes I would join him and we would stretch and bend and hiss together, like a pair of shadows. On Sundays he woke morose, threw on yesterday’s clothes and headed straight out without so much as brushing his teeth, returning only late in the evening; I learned this was the day he visited his parents in Poissy, and was undoubtedly given his allowance, for he would burst in on me as I was painting or reading and recruit me to come out to a rock show or the bars, buying all the drinks and all the drugs, staying up as long as possible, so that neither of us ever made it to our Monday classes. He had lots of girlfriends, of course, in a variety of shapes and sizes and even ages (I was once only a little surprised to discover the henna-haired woman who ran the corner tabac perched primly on the toilet one weekday morning; she couldn’t have been a day younger than fifty), but he favored most of all a type he called the Swan: long-necked, small-bosomed girls with long hair like Bardot’s or cropped hair like Jean Seberg’s. These beauties haunted me, quite literally, for as I said there were no real walls in our flat and so time and time again I’d open my eyes in the dark and, from my mattress, catch glimpses of these naked apparitions gliding to and from Charles’s bed. Once in a while, out of curiosity or pity, one of these girls would come to join me on my own mattress on the floor, but not knowing what to say or do, I would just lie there petrified until she withdrew, confused and offended. I recall one particularly humiliating adventure, the morning after one of these encounters: I was in my life-drawing class and as I began to rub charcoal on the paper, I realized that the model was Charles’s latest Swan, the same girl who’d come to lie next to me just a few hours before, whispering filthy nothings into my ear and groping for my penis while I had tried to express my diffidence by turning away. It made no difference, she pressed her breasts against my back and reached around to fondle me so that I was forced to grasp her wrist and squeeze it until she cried out. Motherfucker, she said, and stalked off. Now in the studio she sees me by my easel and smirks, then abruptly shifts from her neoclassical pose (a virgin cradling an imaginary jar), ignoring the instructor’s protests, and gets down on all fours and thrusts her buttocks in my direction and looks back at me and sticks out her tongue. The electricity in the room shifted suddenly in my direction, though not a soul looked at me; I heard someone laugh once behind me as I stared at the blank blackened tablet, my face burning, my peripheral vision overwhelmed by the dark tufted cleft I dared not confront directly, itself a grin of perfect insolence, and I seemed to hear that laugh a second time (but it was not so, everyone was silent, concentrating, working earnestly to capture the new pose) and I knew that it had belonged to Charles, though he was not enrolled in the class and should not have been there. And now comes the most humiliating part: not the humiliation itself—not the compromised position that Charles’s Swan had put me in, nor Charles’s own easy contempt, but the fact that I was now excited, intent, and hard as a stone. I began to sketch, using just a rubber eraser and my fingers, working with tremendous rapidity to lighten the charcoal veneer in the right places, so that curve and volume and depth began to make their appearances, each globe of her rump taking shape, and the grimy soles of her feet, the valley of her spine leading down to her angular shoulders like white outcroppings in a black bay, the black mass of hair and the sliver of visible face and just the tip of her tongue now panting between the white rows of her teeth, and then picking up again the stick of charcoal and working with intensity to deepen and blacken the profusion of pubic hair, which in my drawing seemed like the outer layers of a vortex leading into the null space, the utter darkness of her asshole and cunt, I couldn’t see them with my eyes but the charcoal could. My hands completely blackened, I stepped back and almost bumped into Charles, who had stepped away from his own drawing to study mine. He said nothing. But that night, in our usual café, where some awful folksinger was the center of attraction so that we had the sidewalk nearly to ourselves, in spite of the November damp, he jumped to his feet and moved into the crowd and returned with the same Swan on his elbow. She looked at me unsmiling, her cornflower eyes kohl-rimmed under the sort of glasses John Lennon had made famous.

  I thought I ought to introduce you two properly, Charles said. Gustave Lessy, this is Simone.

  Enchanté, said Simone drily. She had an English accent.

  I looked at Charles, but he just winked at me. He made a show of pulling Simone’s chair out for her, then turned his own around and straddled it. Simone asked me for a light and I took out my lighter. She leaned forward and cradled my fist, eyes meeting mine. The flame flashed sardonically in her glasses.

  Charles says you’re not really a faggot, she said, blowing smoke.

  He’s a virgin, Charles explained.

  Virgins, faggots, she said, no difference. Is that what you are?

  I blushed my answer.

  Right, she said in English. She looked at Charles and they both laughed. I pushed back suddenly from the table, which screeched. People looked at us, at me, towering clumsily over the beautiful ones.

  My brother, Charles said easily, smiling up at me.

  Rough customer, Simone said to him. It’s all right, she said to me. She smiled at me, warmly this time, but still with a hint of a taunt in it. Come back to my place, eh?

  It was all arranged, apparently. Simone put out her smoke and moved around the table to put her hand on my shoulder.

  You’re very strong, she said. Statement of fact.

  We went back to the flat she shared with a roommate on the Boul’ Mich. The roommate was sitting on the sofa, by a lamp, absorbed in a book; other books, papers, and pencils were scattered on the low table in front of her. She was short but wonderfully shaped, a true hourglass, not a Swan at all. She wore jeans and a peasant blouse and no makeup that I could see, her bare feet tucked under her. Her skin was nearly translucent, her face a glowing oval in the frame of her dark hair. She looked up distractedly at the jingling of Simone’s key.

  Hey, she said. In English, with an American accent.

  Have you seen Louis around? Simone asked, as though they’d only just been discussing him. The other girl shook her head. Simone led me by the hand to a closed door, opened it, then seemed to remember something.

  Gustave, she said to the girl, indicating me, and then reversing, said the other’s name.

  Enchantée, I said, meaning it.

  Yeah. She looked me up and down and then raised an eyebrow to Simone, who shrugged.

  No good deed— Simone started.

  Goes unpunished, finished the other. She cocked her head wryly and gave me a little wave. Go to it, then. Bonsoir.

  Bonsoir, I said, turning for one last look at her as Simone pulled me into the bedroom and kicked shut the door with a bang.

  But does it not appear that our view of things just then, in Gustave’s dark backward, stands outside his own possible point of view? We remain for a lingering moment with M, her hair shining under the reading lamp, the slam of Simone’s door dying away, guessing what it conceals. The truth and verity of the camera: it shows only what can be shown. How then are we to receive Gustave’s narrative? Do we follow him back into time by means of flashback, seeing what he describes? Show don’t tell. But what I show is what he tells. Gustave framed by the blank sober wall of the hotel room, lit from the side by the window through which the lights of the city radiate. Imperceptibly, excruciatingly, the camera zooms in, millimeter by millimeter, as he tells his story: medium shot of his torso and head, close-up of the great gray slab of his face, dyed slick hairs on top, chins waddling below; further close-up into the essential features, his eyes and eyebrows and nose and cheekbones and moving lips; extreme close-up of a single feature, but which? The eyes alone,
a single eye, the pupil darting, contracting, dilating, a tiny Lamb, our camera, in the center? Or the wet lips lit occasionally by the tip of the pink tongue, his white dentures and gray gums churning grotesquely? The words, the words. To accommodate them must the camera start ever further back, tracking in from street level into the hotel, riding a baggage cart in subtle slow motion, passing through the expensive hush of the lobby and under the mild indifferent gaze of the concierge into the elevator, confronting the closed door as the floors ring off, and when it opens, gliding out into the carpeted hallway and down through the soft glow of tear-shaped sconces past the numbered doors to a particular door that swings open at the last moment to reveal it, the bed, the television, the telephone, the other camera posed between the two men seated before the window? Must we travel even further outward, ever upward, until we take in the entire horizon of the city—spread out on its vast plain, divided by the snaking river, no visible gap between east and west except perhaps in the shapes of architecture, the east more rectilinear, the west fractal in its conformation to the vast park and, at its edge, the black shimmer of lakes, while to the east nothing is visible beyond a more fatal blackness, hinting at forests, at nothingness. Taking in the widest possible scene, at the limits of intelligibility, then swooping down like the world’s slowest bird of prey toward the city center, its Mitte, down to the black featureless rectangle of the roof, and somehow through it, as if it were peeled off to reveal the cellular life of the separate rooms in which people sleep and fuck and stare at screens, focusing now on the singular cell from above where are grouped the lucid geometries of bed and desk, lamp and table, and two black heads, two bodies, one camera on its tripod with red LED glowing steady toward and into which we finally plunge, oblivion of sight that we meet with the moment Gustave’s story returns us to the present? Or must space expand still further, so that the camera flies from yet another great Western capital—Vienna, Rome, Zurich, London, the Paris preserved by Gustave, antecedent to the city of now—flies from a crumbling high monument of the present eastward into Gustave’s past? From Paris itself, Paris of memory, overlay or underlay to the Paris briefly wandered and scrutinized by the new reader, then the Paris of the twenty-first century, the lens streaked with oily rain obscuring our view of the expected (the bridges, the churches, the Orsay, the rhinestone sparkle of the Tower at dusk, the men in shabby clothes sleeping with hats over their faces on the quays of the Seine, the faces of Sarkozy and his wife, the fires in the banlieues, the overturned cars, the graffiti, the exploded schools) so that the Paris of our fathers’ time can flicker into sight—Gustave’s past, a generation’s past, the exuberant troublemakers with their pale faces and red banners, cops with short combs on their helmets like embarrassed roosters, the tear gas then joining hands with the tear gas now, the hurled stones, Algiers under everything (sous les pavés le pavé), Paris of revolutions, now and always, what goes around comes around, sticks around, comes aground. Drunk on the violence of recollection: Gustave’s eye, Gustave’s mouth, Gustave’s confession, Gustave’s Paris—these things are now ours, the camera gives them to us, memory becomes sensation, to thrill us for once and to be forgotten for all.