Salim Bachi - Paris Noir

“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 Ursuline 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 unimaginable to this day of which one would have to in order to say other words than always the same ones and thus today senseless and outdated tomorrow by audiovisual without a printer, I do not know what to say, Smiley — in French 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. ’”

“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?”