Amberville (13 page)

W
orse than pain, worse than treachery and beatings. Worse than the most intense anxiety or the most dreadful humiliation; worse than all of this is cursed memory. Days on end can go by, then the clouds draw in over the city, the sky darkens, and rain dampens the wrecked cars around the place where I live: large raindrops that indolently settle onto mangled metal car bodies. Then the past forces its way through the membrane of time, in the empty hole in my chest a heart is pulsing anew. And when I awaken and everything around me is refuse and putrefaction, the collision between then and now is violent. It causes me to lose my breath. This cursed Garbage Dump was my destiny long before I came here.

I met Nicole Fox through an editor at the publishing house—I don’t recall his name. I still hadn’t published my first book; my collection of poems, to which I’d given the title
approach…honeysuckle,
would be coming out the following week and I was already scared to death about its reception. I don’t know if what frightened me most was the
thought of being publicly criticized, or if it would be worse to be passed over in silence. It seemed to me that the looks I encountered everywhere were insidious and scornful and I was on my way to the exit at high speed when I stumbled over Nicole Fox.

She was sitting in an armchair, and her long legs became my deliverance. I fell like a tree, but thank goodness she was the only one who noticed. Together we fled from the place. Nicole became my savior and my deliverance. Life before I met her had been a single long denial, and the poetry collection was the climax of wretchedness. The poems had been written over a period of ten years, and when I locked myself into the cellar of a condemned building in Yok with cigarettes and moonshine alcohol, I didn’t give a thought to tomorrow. I’d pissed on my friends, betrayed my family, and done my best to strip myself of all pride and dignity. It was a wreck who stumbled into that cellar in Yok. I drank to fall asleep. I relieved myself on the floor in a corner of the room, but after a few days I didn’t shit anymore because I didn’t have anything to excrete. It was the pains in my stomach that finally forced me out of that cellar. The poems were finished, I don’t know if they’d been finished for weeks or only for a day or two, but with the manuscript under my arm I made my way up to the street. I cringed in the sunlight, I thought that the wind was ripping and tearing my fur, and I thought everyone I encountered was staring at me. I walked hour after hour with my gaze on the colorful asphalt until I suddenly recognized where I was. I was in Angela’s neighborhood. Because I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I knew where she hid the key, I let myself into her empty apartment and managed to eat my way through the major part of the contents of her refrigerator before she came home. When she saw me she screamed like the guenon that she was, and she didn’t stop screaming before I left. I forgot the manuscript on her kitchen table, but didn’t have
the energy to go back and fuss about it. The poems weren’t worth it. Out of pure sadism Angela turned the manuscript in to Doomsbury Verlag. The result was that an editor from Doomsbury found me at the Century Bar just over a week later. He paid my tab—that was the condition for me being able to leave the place—and with that, half of my advance for the poems was used up. Out on the street I sobered up enough that I could sign the contract. But I was nonetheless pleased; I would make my debut as a poet.

When my first book of poems was reviewed I’d been living at home with Nicole Fox for the past several days. She smelled of meadow flowers, she knew what I would say before I said it, and she had perfect pitch for when I wanted to be close and when I needed space. I was still a miserable animal without anything to risk, without spine or value, but with every day that I spent with Nicole something was growing inside me. It was self-worth.
approach…honeysuckle
received an effusively warm reception. Without my understanding it—because I was a fool in heart and soul—it was my living together with Nicole Fox that gave me strength, and not the cane-wielding critics at the daily papers. But I believed that my newly awakened power had to do with the book, and, with Nicole’s enthusiastic approval, I set out into the city to fill my arms with application forms. My life as a paralyzed hyena was over; I was intoxicated by a sense of my own will. Together with my beautiful fox, I sat the entire day and half the night, filling in small squares and writing my name on dotted lines. I applied for grants and jobs, for the first time in my life.

Everything went so fast. After many tough years of life without content, it seemed as though everything happened overnight. A marvelous everyday life emerged together with Nicole Fox. She was living in a roomy two-room apartment in Tourquai, and her neighborhood was a universe that un
expectedly opened itself to me. There was the bakery that sold bread over counters out toward the sidewalk, which is why there was always the aroma of fresh-baked rolls on the street. There was the café at the corner by the park where the milk foam was always shaped into a heart. Nicole and I lived in this idyllic state. The months passed, and finally we were on our way to being caught by grim reality that sent us insistent reminders of telephone, water, and electrical bills. It was then that I got my grant. One day in August, an anonymous, brown envelope from the Ministry of Culture’s Office of Grants was lying on the hallway floor in all modesty. We celebrated that evening with a bottle of champagne, but we had a bad conscience from having been extravagant and skipped breakfast the next morning.

It was a lovely time.

Hindsight’s common sense fills us with the knowledge of that which was, and that which is to come. But you have to be loyal to your younger self. What I did then, I could not have done better.

It took time to gather together the sequel to my first collection of poems. I was filled with life: I had begun not just one but two degree programs, one whose purpose was to complement the sorts of things I had gone without, and a second in order to go further in life. The poems I wrote became short and empty, light as air and just as transient. Nicole read them, and, without taking the enjoyment from me, she was definite in her criticism. Between the first collection and the happy verses I was squeezing out of me there was now a chasm. This chasm, said my wise fox, was considerably more interesting than the verses at hand.

We got married. I had no expectations about the ceremony itself. I was neither a believer nor an atheist, I didn’t have time to invite either relatives or friends, and yet I felt so proud that I was about to burst. In a little pavilion in Parc
Clemeaux where the Afternoon Weather struck drumrolls against the roof, such that the deacon was forced to raise his voice: there I wed Nicole Fox. It felt like I made her my property, and I was ashamed of that feeling. We had dinner at a nice restaurant on Rue Dalida, and then Nicole fell asleep, worn out, at midnight. I sat up writing without interruption. It became a long suite of poems about hes and shes. The words dripped with self-loathing and shame over my sex, but I had no idea where all these feelings came from. Later, attentive readers would understand that there was something affected about this collection, whereupon I became very upset. But the poems were good. Nicole read them when I was finished the following evening, and she congratulated me for having found the way out that I had unconsciously sought. Here I had a worthy successor to
approach…honeysuckle
.

Book number two received respectful treatment as well. By this time I had finished my basic courses and had just begun doctoral studies in comparative literature. The book became the starting point for a debate about genre which I lost interest in after the first article. I applied for a new grant with the Ministry of Culture, and when I got the money, Nicole and I began to think in earnest about having cubs.

We decided to be just as wise and organized in becoming parents as we had been impulsive and passionate in our two-someness. I immediately began to plan for my next book, and at the same time applied for yet another grant. Along with the miserable compensation I got from the Comparative Literature Department, we could get by on the money. We applied to the Cub List.

The third collection didn’t offer the same birth pangs at all as the second had, and my stern, wise fox confirmed what I felt myself. Something new was in the process of being born in my writing career, something grander and more original than I had accomplished before. With every
day our application for a cub climbed up the long waiting list, and poem was added to poem without the quality going down. Nicole observed the connection as obvious.

Then my life was crushed. The annihilation was meticulous and definitive. During the years to come I would curse the day I forgot the manuscript on Angela’s kitchen table, the evening I stumbled over Nicole Fox’s legs; if I hadn’t learned what happiness was, it could never have been taken away from me. And it all depended on a single animal. Snake Marek.

I didn’t even know he existed. During the entire humiliating and drawn-out process that was my case, I didn’t know that Snake Marek existed. I found that out much later, by chance; it’s not interesting and doesn’t add anything to the story. The important thing is what he did. The decisive thing is the way in which he sat deep inside the dark culvert of the Ministry of Culture, letting bitterness ooze out of every stitch of his insignificant body. With my first two poetry collections I had passed his Argus eyes, but the third time my application forms were on his desk he caught sight of me. And for some reason that spiteful reptile decided to crush me. One day I received a letter saying that my grant money would not be coming. A new decision had been made, it read, and it had been decided to freeze my grant “for the time being.”

I didn’t take this seriously. I tried to reach one of the assistants at the Office of Grants on the phone, without success. Then I let the matter rest. When I mentioned in passing my worry to Nicole, she became hopping mad.

She initiated a massive apparatus. They couldn’t be serious, you didn’t do this kind of thing to the few geniuses that the city had produced. Nicole wrote petitions and organized debates (which were not particularly well attended). She wrote letters to the editor and tried to get others to do
the same thing (but only one was published). And when at last she threatened a sit-down strike outside the Office of Grants, she finally got a response. An assistant—it proved much later to be Snake Marek himself—wrote an open letter in response. The letter was sent to the arts editors at the newspapers, to the Department of Comparative Literature, and home to me and Nicole. “The quality of Bataille’s poetry,” it read, “is such that a grant would send the wrong signals.” Neither more nor less.

Perhaps I could have brought myself through the ordeal if that letter hadn’t been written. I would have been able to lie low for a few months and then dared to come out of the apartment. Looked my colleagues in the eyes again after the summer, perhaps even smiled apologetically at Nicole Fox’s exaggerated reaction. But the Ministry of Culture had written its letter, and the wording was diabolical. Everyone could freely interpret what was wrong with my poetry. It proved that I had detractors everywhere, snipers who were only waiting for the right moment.

I didn’t retaliate. Despite Nicole’s irritation, I didn’t retaliate, I pulled the blanket even farther up over my head and stayed in bed. Day and night. The second collection of poems deserved criticism, I knew that better than anyone, I’d known it the whole time without daring to admit it. The pathos that carried the collection was fictional, I’d never been concerned with any battle of the sexes. Whatever Nicole said, I couldn’t get away from the feeling of being exposed. I had Nicole bring home alcohol so that I could use the sleeping pills I’d squirreled away over the years. They worked better combined with alcohol, and I slept away a few days in a kind of unpleasant daze. It was too damn selfish; Nicole needed support, but I had a hard time putting up with myself, and the thought of finding the energy to carry her as well was impossible. When the alcohol was
gone and I came to my senses again, it was the middle of the night and coal black outside the windows; I jumped out of bed and burned the almost-finished manuscript of the third collection in the sink. Nicole, who’d been sleeping on the couch in the living room, was wakened by the smoke, but by then it was too late. Together we stood and watched how the charred papers writhed in pain.

The animals at Doomsbury Verlag had of course gotten cold feet when I’d been publicly criticized. But because they knew that I had come a long way with the approaching collection, they felt pleasantly secure. When I told them that there no longer was any third book, the news spread lightning-fast across the whole city. I was lying drugged in my bed and had no idea what was about to happen.

I don’t know which of all the mendacious versions of my condition reached my colleagues at the university department, but that doesn’t matter. They understood that conditions had changed. In our society it’s money that rules. Giving me the professorship that I had long considered mine was now out of the question. The venerable professors let one of the mice in the office call and convey the decision. My services were no longer required. How could they do that? Morally it was despicable, and it was a question as to whether it was even legal. One of the professors got in touch with me many years later, clearly tormented by his rotting conscience, and let me read the protocol of the meeting they’d had. The protocol was likely set up as evidence in case I should protest. I was described as a labile lunatic who not only was equally mediocre in my research and my poetic practice, but besides had become an abuser of pills with pyromaniac tendencies. What I needed was hospitalization, not one of the few permanent positions in the department.

I had no more than managed to digest the message from
the university when the real catastrophe occurred. In some weird way the news that I would neither get my grant nor retain my job was all over town in no time, and two days later we got a letter from the Cub List. Without incomes we were being removed from the list for the time being, it read. Impudently we were encouraged, however, to make a new attempt when our personal financial situation had improved. I recall the morning when the letter came; it still lives on in my nightmares. I got up, thinking that everything had been taken from me. I got up, believing that I was already standing at the bottom of the hole of life. But that morning I understood that nothing had been as important to me as Nicole Fox.