Planus (12 page)

Who has drawn my portrait to date? Young unknown painters, who were friends at the time, and either remained unknown or, like Marc Chagall, became famous. That sad and warm-hearted man, Modigliani, painted me as Poil de Carotte, and this portrait hangs today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Fernand Leger painted me in the mouth of a 75-millimetre cannon. I am told that 1

Leon Bakst, the maestro of the Russian ballet, has painted an admirable portrait of me, which is very puzzling as I never sat for him. Bakst must have painted this portrait a short while before his death when, in a fit of madness, he had run away and hidden himself in a luxurious hotel in Monte Carlo, where this provincial dandy, a character from
Dead Souls,
lived incognito, but believed himself to be Moses, and let his rabbinical beard grow; this ex-beau, with his colour-blind elegance, his rose-pink suits and silk shirts, the cock of the walk in Diaghilev's company, no longer bothered to undress and peed in his pants. He had set himself up, surrounded by his painting equipment, on a large calf-skin sofa, and it was impossible to budge him from it. I have always wondered why I should have haunted him at such a moment, and so much so that, apart from the portrait, they discovered some thirty caricatures of me after his death, just as, on the death of Caruso, about a hundred others were found in the famous tenor's home, but then Caruso had a mania for sketching his guests and I had spent three weeks with him, in New York in 1910, whereas Bakst and I had never been intimate friends, having met only some half-dozen times, though it is true that the handsome Leon was a little jealous of me, believing I had wooed a dancer away from him, poor man, but we cleared up this misunderstanding, laughingly, at the
Caneton
over a glass of vodka, and I would never have thought that this casual incident could have held such importance for him until the day of his death. There is a very fine portrait of me, as romantic as I could wish, with hair down to my shoulders under a wide cowboy hat, and I was surprised to see it, after thirty-two years of separation, hanging in a room at my brother's house in The Hague. It is by the painter Richard Hall, an
hors concours
member of the Artistes francais, who recently died in Buenos Aires at the age of nearly one hundred. He was the handsomest man I have ever known. Probably other artists sketched me without my knowing, in a cafe or somewhere, and it is not to be excluded that Picasso, like Leon Bakst, has painted me, as a pompous pedant, a monkey, an amputee, a harlequin (some people claim they have recognized my back view on the curtain for 'Parade') or God- knows-what, during one of the attacks of insomnia he suffers from periodically, and has flung my picture across his studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins — which I nicknamed the 'Cinema of Dust' on account of the black moods of the master of the place, his putrefying dissecting-tables, the bluebottles swarming there, laying eggs and settling on his still lifes, and because of Lucky, his owl, his latest companion, if the newspapers are to be believed.

Today is 1st September, 1947, my birthday, I am sixty years old. Who am I? (page 1392)

In truth, I believe I can only reply to this question by taking as my scale of values the vices known as the Seven Deadly Sins: gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath, envy, sloth and pride, and measuring myself in relation to them, my idea of them, the art and practice of them, going through the hoops just as one is made to do when undergoing certain tests, filling out a form or applying for an identity card: weight, height, colour of eyes, dentition, right ear, profile, full-face, skin pigmentation, blood group, finger-prints, distinguishing marks (warts, beauty spots, tattoos), defects (hunchback, club-foot), accidents (the amputation of my right arm, for example), phenomena : (dwarf or giant, bearded lady or hermaphrodite, etc.), all this pseudo-scientific claptrap being primarily of use to the police as a means of detection, but by virtue of which it is believed you can number off an individual and place him in the right classification, so as to lay your hands on him more easily. I am willing enough, but what hands? Dirty hands. And that revolts me. So I prefer to place myself once more in God's hands, and we shall see what the devils have made of me, and how I come out at the age of sixty, for I do not really exist, I cannot define myself, except in relation to the Seven Deadly Sins, every one of which I have committed. Let God weigh me in the balance and be my judge.  i

First Deadly Sin: GLUTTONY. It is not because of its name that I cannot take this vice seriously, although it sounds like a gurgling of the bowels and is so laughable in Church Latin:
gastrimargia, quod sonat ventris ingluvies
(one feels like hailing every fart that erupts, like the Romans, or bowing and smiling with satisfaction at every belch, like the Arabs), and although I know very well that gluttony of the belly which the Holy Fathers allude to in their definition of greed, that guzzling and drunkenness which lead to the worst excesses a man can fall into, becoming degraded < and enslaved : for the brute beasts, there is coprophagy (I have known two cases), and delirium tremens (the classic case, the padded cells are full of alcoholics who have to be restrained in strait-jackets); for the refined, there is opium with its ever-deceptive allure, its addiction, increasing from the strong to the massive dose, the stupefying belly-punch; and for the delicate, who finally become ferocious at about the age of forty, there is sodomy, as witness the trial of

Gilles de Retz and the testimony of the prophet Ezekiel apostrophizing Jerusalem: 'Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.' (Ezekiel xvi: 49) And the fulgurating ascetic knew what he was talking about when it came to nourishment, for God had made him eat THE ROLL. (Ezekiel iii: 1, 2)

For his part, Leonardo da Vinci coldly declares: 'Men are unworthy of their organs, the marvellous workings of their admirable machine. They think of nothing but stuffing their digestive tube at the top end and emptying it at the bottom.' Or again: 'Men are good for nothing but producing excrement.' I blanched when I read this, for at eighteen or twenty years old I felt nothing but contempt for the masses; I had just escaped from the first Russian revolution and the first pitfalls of the life into which I had flung myself with blind folly (revolution and aviation, those triumphs of civil and military bureaucrats, have been the two great disillusionments of my life, I will write about this elsewhere, at the proper time and place, and also how, for the love of a young girl who was hanged at Viborg, Finland, I spent a whole summer manufacturing bombs at my villa in Terrioki). Taking inspiration from the innate pessimism of da Vinci, and the geological, indeed cosmic, backgrounds in his paintings, an outstanding example being the
Mona Lisa
, I had wanted to compose a symphony on the theme of The Flood (to be precise, it was at the time when I disembarked from Papadakis's sailing-ship at Genoa that I thought of writing this symphony and taking Paris by storm!), for, before I was seized by the demon of writing, I had hoped to become a musician. I was very gifted and received a great deal of encouragement, my musical studies were the only ones I carried through almost to a conclusion, and my professor was very impressed by my comic gift, which is so rare in music, and predicted a great future for me. But music is as remote as China, it is crying for the moon, and the amputation of my right arm put an end to my ambitions and kicked me brutally out of that aesthetic rut where I would probably have been bogged down, like the poets and painters of the Soirees de Paris, in 1914. The war saved me by dragging me away and throwing me amongst the people in arms, one anonymous number amongst millions of others. No. 1529. What intoxication ! Truth is in wine. Truth and liberty. Long live booze, and that good, rough red wine !

It takes a long experience of life, and many a tot of rotgut drunk in the low dives Zola wrote about, amongst the common people, to relearn how to love your fellow-man as a brother. The proletarian who gets drunk on Saturday nights 'after the treadmill', or the farmworker on Sunday morning, which is pay-day, does so not so much as a way of drowning his sorrows but as a protest against the boss who tramples on him, the politician who exploits him, the military who make him foam at the mouth, established law and order, the police, the State, for which he doesn't give a bugger, this regime of factories, prisons, penal servitude, which should be booted off the face of the earth, just like that! And he shakes the counter with a blow of his fist, swallows a last glass of wine and chucks his sous in the face of the bistro-keeper, and alas, dear God, he is the one who gets booted to the ground! . . . There is no justice. . . . 'Death to the swine! Death to the bourgeois! . . . Tally-ho! ... At 'em boys! . . . The fancy-priced whores and the capitalists' little starlets are our people! The bitches are with us! . . .' He sees red, the working man, but he sees clearly, and neither God nor the Pope will blame him for putting rebellion into his glass. The Church is made up of saints, of mystical and transcendental drunkards,
enfants terribles
who tread the grapes of Noah. And when our Lord hid a vine-root on board Noah's Ark, as well as stocking it with male and female animals, it was because God had a long-term policy . . . the redemption, the wine of the Cross: 'Take, eat, this is my body. . . . Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood' (Matthew xxvi: 26, 27, 28) ... a far-reaching consolation for the curse of work.

And so, in spite of the warnings of the Holy Fathers, the apostrophe of the prophet, the condemnation pronounced by the greatest spirit of the Renaissance (and its only misanthrope), the example of invalids, madmen, monsters, the possessed, the intoxicated, the depraved (I am thinking of the woman described by Huysman, who defiled the consecrated host to appease her uterine hunger), and despite the hope of poor drunkards, of whom I am one, I find it hard to consider gluttony as a mortal sin, for I come from a family of gourmets, and I cannot believe that God has provided so many good things to eat, all over the world, and scattered manna from heaven in order to damn or contaminate the human race, although many other temptations of nature might lead one to believe this. And yet it was by this besetting sin, in which so many devout persons and churchmen still indulge (as is well known), that Eve was tempted and to which she succumbed. But who will cast the first stone at her? Certainly not that fathead Adam!

The taste-buds of the tongue and palate sing God's praises more loudly than do the flowers of the field, and the cooking of mankind, with its fragrant smoke rising all over the surface of the earth, this daily miracle ceaselessly renewed, this mystery from which has sprung the whole of human civilization, has its origins in acts of sacrifice and thanksgiving. It is the only moment when man is happy to be alive. Surely God cannot take offence, in spite of the adulteration of wine —
crapula vini
— and the beastliness of certain local or national dishes, not forgetting the banquets of cannibals: Seabrook, the famous American reporter, claims to have tasted human flesh in Africa and declares that it tastes like chine of pork, but, long before, the islanders of the New Hebrides were already calling their victims 'long pigs' and preferred the native blacks to the white men, who, so they informed Captain Cook, 'have a funny taste'. However, these geezers were not too fussy, they managed to eat the noble La Perouse, at Vanikoro.

My grandmother, a saintly woman, was a
cordon bleu
cook, and her husband, my maternal grandfather, a splendid horseman, spoke of his cellar, and the rare, indeed unique, bottles it contained — only selected vintages, nothing but the very finest years — as a bibliophile might speak of his library. (I made myself a false key and helped myself, carrying off those noble bottles in triumph to share with my friends on days when we played football. Wretched scamp, I had no respect for anything!)

Aunt Claire, the only old maid in the family, was forgiven for all her silly, affected airs and her bad tempers because, in summer, she would make jams, fruit jellies and syrups and, in winter, tisanes, infusions, spiced grog and rum punch. (I still have her recipe for mulled wine, which would revive a corpse!)

My uncle Alfred, chef at the Big Salem, used to roll up at the restaurant like a prima donna arriving at the theatre, in a brougham drawn by two dappled greys, which caused a sensation in Chicago at that time. Numerous dessert dishes bear his name.

It took me years to realize that my mother's neurasthenia and fastidiousness were a form of repressed gluttony, nibblings of the soul, like the secret vice of taking a box of chocolates or marrons glaces up to bed and making the sheets sticky.

My father, who was at one time President of the 'Sixteen Stone Society', because he weighed over twenty stone, was not only a lover of feasts and drinking orgies, holding his own at table with all comers, but also a well-informed gastronome, and many exquisite dishes are named in his honour. (The last time I saw him, in his little precision-tool workshop in a village perched high in the Bernese Jura, where he died at the age of eighty-seven, solitary and penniless, he ate a chicken in cream sauce, with mushrooms and steamed rice, and drank a magnum of champagne — Heidsieck, extra dry — every evening; he ran up debts and spent the night playing billiards, a game at which he was once world champion, and was ready to challenge Death himself.)

I also have two dishes named after me in Sao Paulo; they were dedicated to me by Ernestine, a friend's cook, a black matron who was fond of me because I did justice to her cooking and always came to the kitchen to thank her after each meal, which flattered the proud creature immensely. One is a chocolate cake containing pineapple slices and crushed mangoes, the other a braised suckling- pig served in a banana-leaf on a bed of sugar-canes, cinnamon and vanilla. As for water, I have never drunk it in my life, thanks to the spankings Lily gave me in Egypt to din into me the dangers of typhoid fever. Moreover, I agree absolutely with the views of old Dr Bezangon, a master with a Jesuitical taste for the paradox, who has written a most beautiful chapter on love at first sight, and who claims that water is so contaminated that it is unfit for any use, including washing. Actually, I did not need Lily's arguments to put me off it for ever, as our great game as children consisted in going up to all the floors of the deserted Palace Hotel in Heliopolis (my father's first business venture, begun thirty years too early, at a time when tourism did not exist; it failed with a resounding crash and was bought up by Baron Empain), going into the bathrooms, turning on all the taps and watching millipedes, earwigs, scarabs, lizards and little snakes fall into the bathtubs, to be followed by a trickle of nauseating water, although it was the water of the Nile, Father of Waters. Otherwise, I have drunk every kind of eau-de-vie that is made in the world, out of curiosity, as a connoisseur, from thirst, and if I had been a contemporary of Panurge I would certainly have embarked with him aboard the vessel which was to take him to the island of the divine bottle, where the oracle rang: TRINK!