The Other Shore. Michael Jackson
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is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable.3
We did not board the aircraft together, or sit together, or seek each other out at Le Bourget to say goodbye and exchange addresses. I remember the throng of reporters and cameramen trying to interview or photograph the nuns and priests who had been rescued from Stanleyville. I remember the sudden cold, my regret at having left the Congo, and the long taxi ride to my old hotel at 8 rue de la Harpe in the cinquième.
I sat in the back seat, dog-tired, reluctant to talk. The driver, recognizing this, or thinking I did not speak French, kept his thoughts to himself, though I could see he wanted to talk.
His right arm was missing. He held the wheel with his left hand, and steadied it with the two stainless steel fingers that were his right.
I wondered whether he’d lost his arm in the war, and how he’d managed to get a license. Though the Citroën had automatic shift.
Our eyes met in the rear view mirror. He had a Gauloise stuck in the corner of his mouth, and his face was screwed up in a permanent squint against the smoke. He looked like a man with a sense of humor and a lot of goodwill. I felt myself relaxing into the seat as we drove along the river toward the old quarter.
Notre Dame was floodlit. In its dark moat, the Seine was slicked with oily light.
It was raining now. Quai des Grands-Augustins. Rue Saint-Jacques.
At the corner of the Boul’Mich, we stopped for a red light. A group of students hurried across the intersection, bundled in coats.
They were laughing, and their faces were wet with the rain.
The driver half turned to me, and made a small gesture with his steel hand.
“Les jeunes s’amusent!”
That morning, I bought a Spirax notebook and wrote of that solitary boy under the bruised rainy season skies over Lake Kivu—asking myself why I had forsaken him, who had no one dependent on me, unless it was my own undeveloped self crying out to be mentored, toughened and matured, so that it could come into its own. And with masochistic nostalgia I recalled the opening lines of A. R. D. Fairburn’s “Rhyme of the Dead Self.”
Tonight I have taken all that I was
and strangled him that pale lily-white lad
I have choked him with these my hands these claws
Catching him as he lay a-dreaming in his bed.
FOUR
Writing under the Influence
ITALO CALVINO OBSERVES THAT WHEN WE READ, “we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something . . . that is . . . past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead.”1 This was certainly the case for me in Paris. I plunged into reading Blaise Cendrars as if my life depended on it. Feverishly, I sketched a work of fiction about an imaginary figure that I had glimpsed in the pages of Cendrars’ Moravagine, Gide’s Voyage au Congo, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And there were moments, late at night, when I felt as if I was co-authoring Cendrars’ posthumous work, channeling him, a custodian of his afterlife.
The story of Moravagine echoes its author’s biography, which in turn kaleidoscopically reminds one of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud died a few months after the amputation of his right leg; the narrator of Moravagine loses his left leg in the war, and in a Cannes hospital he encounters the writer Blaise Cendrars who has had his right arm amputated.
Born Frédéric-Louis Sauser in the small watch-making city of La Chaux-de-Fonds (its two other famous sons were Le Corbusier and Chevrolet), Cendrars spent much of his childhood on the move. When the family returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1901 and Freddy’s father enrolled him in a trade school, the fifteen-year old rebelled. Truant and restive, he ran up bills at local wine shops and kiosks, subscribed to dirty magazines, screwed around, and yearned for the exotic elsewhere he had glimpsed in Alexandria, Genoa, Naples, Brindisi, London, and Paris. Locked in his room one night by his anguished father, Freddy stole out of the house “like a sleepwalker,” sick in his stomach at the thought that he might never return. He boarded the first train out of Neuchâtel and ended up in Basel. From there he picked up a train to Berlin. After traveling aimlessly around Germany for several weeks, he arrived in Pforzheim and fell in with a Warsaw Jew and jewelry merchant called Rogovine. Together they headed east toward Russia and the first tremors of the revolution.
Cendrars’ Russian journeys would become immortalized in his epic of the open road, The Prose of the Trans-Siberian:
Back then I was still an adolescent
Barely sixteen though my childhood was already half forgotten
Sixteen thousand leagues from my birthplace
In Moscow, city of the thousand and three bell towers and the seven stations
And I couldn’t get enough of those seven stations and the thousand and three towers
My adolescence so ardent and crazy
That my heart burned, by turns, like the temple at Ephesus and Moscow’s Red Square at sundown
My eyes reconnoitering ancient roads
Though I was such a lousy poet
I did not know how to push myself to the limit, to go as far as I had to go.
In Paris a few years later, Cendrars declared the Hôtel des Étrangers his true birthplace and called for the complete erasure of his past. Since fire and ash are universal images of rebirth, and one’s previous life must be reduced to ashes if the phoenix is to rise, the young poet coined his name for its associations of embers, cinders and auto-da-fé. With Nietztsche’s smoldering lines in the back of his mind—Und alles wird mir nur zur Asche/Was ich liebe, was ich fasse (And everything of mine turns to ashes/What I love and what I do)2—Cendrars was also aware that Blaise and braise were near homonyms, and that the sobriquet Cendrars ironically merged ashes (cendres) and art (ars in Latin, as in arson).
Moravagine was first published in 1926. Raymond, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, recently transferred from Paris to the luxurious Waldensee Sanatorium near Berne in Switzerland. Rather than dismiss disease as essentially morbid, Raymond believes that what we classify as pathological conditions, and seek to combat or cure, are transitory, intermediary, and potential states of health. As such, they should be allowed to run their course. Conversely, “What is conventionally called heal is nothing more or less than a temporary aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction.”
One of the patients confined in the Sanatorium is a certain Moravagine, allegedly the sole surviving heir of the last King of Hungary. Moravagine was admitted after murdering the prepubescent princess to whom he had been betrothed. Though Moravagine’s appearance is pitiful, even imbecilic, his voice is seductive. “It possessed me completely. I felt an immediate and irresistible liking for this tragic and singular little effigy who dragged himself along within his iridescent voice like a caterpillar in its own skin.” Moravagine becomes the means whereby Raymond will realize his views on the nature of disease. He will liberate this monster and accompany him out into the world. “At last I would live on intimate terms with a great human fauve, watching over, sharing in, accompanying, his life. Steeped in it. Participating in it... studying it.” And so, for several years, this improbable pair travel the length and breadth of Europe, much as Cendrars did in the company of Rogovine, getting caught up in the Russian Revolution, traveling through America, and winding up in the Orinoco before returning to Paris and the maelstrom of the First World War.
It did not take me long to see that the book I planned to write had already been written. What would endure, however, was a fascination with what it means to be possessed by another, by the shadow side of oneself, and how one might understand the connection between the characters that take over a writer’s life and the personae he or she might take on. Africa was, finally, my simile for these neglected or nocturnal aspects