Planus (22 page)

Of course, there are beginnings, rudiments of work carried out on the site, trenches, basins, foundation piles, supporting walls cast in reinforced concrete, scrap-heaps of old iron, canals which have no outlet, artificial lakes and dried-out pools, lock-gates which have never been assembled, railway-trucks and points, among the puddles and the mud and the mountains of damaged material rotting beneath the ravages of winter; light and power have been laid on, high-tension cables, fencing and barbed wire lie scattered amongst the wilderness and invaded by weeds in a vast sector that extends like the tentacles of an octopus from Argenteuil and Gennevilliers to Ivry and as far as the outskirts of Villeneuve-Saint- Georges, but this huge construction site which has no future, this enterprise which will never reach maturity, is generally in a state of neglect, the dredgers, the barges choked and rusting in the black waters, and all the broken-down machinery deteriorating under the pile of detritus from the great city, for, each time the excavators go to work, the refuse lorries tip all the rubbish there. This landscape forever bereft of hope would have enchanted J. K. Huysmans — his favourite walk was along the banks of the Bievre or on the bare butts of the fortifications — and whenever I have visited these sinister haunts in the month of August, I have found, disporting themselves on the artificial beaches or dunking themselves in the pestilential water oozing from God knows where, a whole world of Parisian tramps; men from Les Halles and Maubert, from Bercy and Javel, who usually live under the bridges, came there to delouse themselves, to drink, squabble, strut about like peacocks, and lie with their bellies exposed to the summer sun, nurse their sores, their chancres, settle a fight or make love to pedlar women and street-walkers on holiday, or to snooze among the fields of thistle and chard which reach a height of six feet, and an exuberant blossoming of plants whose common names I do not know. I pointed out these blooms to Alexandre Arnoux, the man who had succeeded in tracing the history and migration of the exotic moss which flowers annually in the interstices of the Obelisk in the place de la Concorde ! And I would come back with a light heart from these rash expeditions into the Paris suburb which constantly delivered up its secrets to me, and I was filled with wonder, as if I had been present all day long at the revels of lizards and salamanders, tadpoles and those Batrachia dear to Jean Lorrain, and had watched the strange libations and rites performed by the tortoise known as 'the beast with two backs' — not Des Esseintes' fastidious and home-loving variety, for, on the contrary, these creatures sneer hideously as they roll and wallow in the tufts of nettles and prickly weeds — and, with my head full of images, I would say to myself : 'What a film! What a hilarious film one could make here, with an endless string of preposterous gags, with the puffed-up toadies from the Ministry, splenetic politicians, racketeers and profiteers, all the flora and fauna of Paris hovering round such a highly charged and serious subject, one with a great economic future, which could revolutionize the city: Paris, Seaport, in a decor of industrial scrubland, a cemetery for machines, collapsing gasometers, floating sewage, lop-sided pyramids of staved-in tar barrels, oil-cans, broken bottles and other nameless refuse of civilization, even an enigmatic sewing-machine and a baby's push-chair.

One fine afternoon in late summer I was strolling along the quays. Unknown to him, I had for some time been following a man, and when he halted between two bookstalls, in a sort of embrasure overlooking the river, I stopped beside him and leaned on the parapet. He had just picked out a volume from a jumble of old books and was bent intently over it; it was some sort of antiphonary with torn binding. One of those tug-boats that have an endless chain built into their steam-engines, a chain that winds and unwinds itself around a paddle-wheel like a central capstan, dragging along the bed of the Seine and somehow hauling the boat against the current, was making an infernal racket and hooting as it lowered its funnel to pass under the Pont des Arts. My heart was in my mouth, I was so moved at finding myself there, right beside this famous man who, with a bad grace, had moved over to make room for me, as if afraid I was going to accost him. Sunlight danced on the river, trapped between its banks, and a sharp wind, running against the current like the string of barges, tore showers of leaves from the trembling poplars and sent them whirling down to the surface of the rippling, verdigris-coloured water. I would rather have been disembowelled alive than address a word to this writer whom I venerated above all others, although I was dying to speak to him; he did not say a word to me, but stood there watching the bobbing string of barges. A line of washing was hung out to dry aboard the last barge, which was very high out of the water, and the bargee and his wife, he with his hair streaming in the wind, and she with her skirts flapping, were standing in the stern, straining against the long bar of the tiller, pushing it right across in an effort to miss one of the piles of the bridge, while the tug-boat was listing heavily to port, trying to right itself as it started to veer round the Cite and position itself correctly to pass under the Pont-Neuf. My neighbour's eyes shifted across to the bank facing us, the Pont-du-Louvre, where they were handling hundreds and thousands of crates of liqueurs, loading them into the forward hatch, a chain of men passing them on from hand to hand, from the quay to one of the little steamers I mentioned just now, the ones that ply between London and Paris; the rest of the cargo was made up of grand pianos, dozens and dozens of them in gigantic crates which were brought up by lorries to be hoisted on swivelling winches and lowered into the forrard hold.

'They'll be weighing anchor tonight. They're fully loaded. The liqueurs are bound for England, but the pianos are going to China, grand pianos have become fashionable there now that the Chinese are cutting off their pigtails and getting modernized. I sold plenty of them in Peking. . ..'

One could spend hours watching other people work, especially at the waterside, when a ship is preparing to sail. I had spoken aloud, but casually, to the air, to no one in particular, as if the words had slipped out unintentionally, hoping by this subterfuge to compel my neighbour, not to take an interest in what I was saying, but to look at me; I had been longing to catch his eye, just once at least, during all the time I had been following him along the quays, and when I found him ferreting about amongst the old bookstalls, both absorbed and absent-minded at the same time, ignoring everybody, his nose buried in a book, his eyes hidden behind pince-nez; but the great man, bent over the antiphonary, pretended to be deaf and did not even turn his head towards me. He was not the kind of man who is eager to please. One sensed that he was a solitary, somewhat churlish and tetchy. Instinctively, he tightened the knot of the white scarf he was wearing about his neck, the ends held by a cameo representing the head of Medusa. He was wearing black gloves, badly worn at the finger-tips. His goatee beard was unkempt, and odd strands of wiry, dishevelled hair stuck out at the back from under a little round hat, full of dents, made of light-weight black felt, such as all the Parisian intellectuals, and the Goncourt-style collectors of Japanese prints, were wearing at that period. He was buttoned up to the chin in a long black cape, with a hood that fell from his shoulders right down to his waist, longer in front than behind, covering his rounded belly and his stooping back. Pleated at the back, bulging over the hips, badly draped, the material dragged and tautened at the front and sides by pockets which were always bursting with the books this insatiable seeker had a knack of unearthing from the bookstalls on the quays, this long garment had something ecclesiastical about it, it was like an exotic but old- fashioned cassock, and it made me think, by contrast, of the stiffly pleated frock-coat worn by Barbey d'Aurevilly, the High Constable of Literature, whose provocative bearing, and manners more suited to a duellist than a man of letters, were legendary. But the puffy, spongy, blown-up body, soft rather than fat, and not unhealthy, that one guessed to be hidden under this extraordinary vestment, was remarkable for its deliberate self-effacement, and my taciturn neighbour had nothing of the swaggerer about him, in spite of his severity. He gave the impression of being a misanthrope. Wobbly pince-nez sat unhappily on his nose, completing the silhouette of a sickly old faun with a glum expression, and correcting whatever there was in his face of too great a pride. But I did not dare to stare at him too much. He looked troubled. I could not catch his eye, with its far-away look. He seemed aware of his own worthiness. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. With his chin resting on his hands and his elbows on the parapet he looked like a gargoyle conscious of his power, of his reputation, but a gargoyle nevertheless. Cunningly, I spoke to him about China to arouse that curiosity of his, so well known to his readers (amongst whom I had been numbered for many years), who wait impatiently each month for it to flare up, wait in gleeful anxiety and suspense to see what will be the next prey and the latest victim of this unprejudiced mind, this devouring, destructive, universal, sceptical, vulgarizing, irreverent, erudite and philosophical dissociater of ideas, this transmutator of values, who lets off such splendid rockets, and I deliberately trotted out, by means of so many apostrophes and interjections, vivid images of contemporary China, a series of snapshots, of photographs which showed up the contradictions and paradoxes between traditional customs and the revolutionary mores brought about by the Americanization of the Middle Empire: the mutilated feet of Chinese women climbing into taxis, a Mandarin judge's robe stored away for the winter in the folds of the illustrated supplement to the Sunday edition of the
Shanghai Times,
which was as thick as your finger; the current craze for cycling, which the women had taken up, threading their way on their brand-new nickel-plated mounts amongst the deep ruts in the granite paving-stones, hollowed out century after century along these historic invasion routes by the incessant comings and goings of the imperial chariots; the gramophones replacing the cages of nightingales and inciting the women to dance the lascivious
pi-hi.
He was contemptuous. I talked about modern China, still very nonchalantly, but watching him all the time. He did not bat an eyelid. I told him that the Manchurian executioner had not yet been replaced by the guillotine, but that the peasants were tending more and more towards the use of a machine- gun, fired at point-blank range, to decapitate a man, or else they would knock him off with a revolver-shot in the neck! He did not even turn his head. There was no apparent reaction. So then, to break through this indifference which I suspected to be a mere affectation, I started to tell the story, still talking to the air, of how I used to light the central-heating boiler in the Hotel des Wagons-Lits, in Peking, every morning during that terrible winter of 1904, with a complete collection of the
Mercure de France
and other printed matter which had been pillaged from the Consulate, in 1900, by the Boxers. His reaction was as sudden as it was unexpected : the great man turned on his heel and walked off without a word, his heavy antiphonary tucked under his arm. I loved him. I would willingly have run after him and begged the favour of being allowed to carry the old tome, which seemed much too heavy for him. I followed him with my eyes. He crossed the road like a blind man, forging straight ahead without worrying about the cars, and I watched him disappear down the rue des Saints-Peres, stubborn, but walking with a strange gait, disjointed, unsteady, hesitant and uncertain in its progression, the weight of his body unevenly distributed, lop-sided, his legs like cotton wool, as weak as an ailing goat. There is a lot of traffic just there. The narrow street resounded with the tooting of cars and the tinkling of bicycle bells. Twilight was falling. I was listening very hard, but I did not hear a voice crying out,
The great Pan is dead!
— and yet it would not have surprised me, right there in the heart of Paris. Indeed, I must confess I was almost expecting to hear it, for the physical appearance of the most illustrious of my contemporaries, the writer I admired more than any other, Remy de Gourmont, had so much of the Beast about it. But, after all, that was only his carcass.

. . . Thus turns the Wheel of Things.

Books, books, what a lot of books! More books pass through the stalls on the quay than water under the bridges of Paris. It's disheartening. Certain cretinous aesthetes ask whether we should burn down the Louvre? The question is prompted by envy, jealousy, a desire to make room for themselves, so that they can elbow their way in and see their paintings hung there during their own lifetime, for they are all wretchedly failed artists (if you have any doubts, just look at the signatures at the bottom of their bawling manifesto !). Furthermore, since they are very knowledgeable about the value of Old Masters, they would all be falling over themselves to sell these pictures on the black market and make some money before they set fire to the place. Burn down the Louvre ? My dear children, for my part I have no objection at all, providing it is a joyful burning, but be patient, wait for the first atomic bombs they have promised us, then you will be grinning, for the bombs will shrivel the gums and lips from your teeth, and nothing will be left on board the good ship Paris, if her proud standard still flutters at the mast-head, nothing but a crew of mangy dogs struck by a mysterious disease, a hundred times worse than scurvy.

'Us poor women,' she exclaimed, 'all the trouble falls on us!'

She could not read, but she had sharp eyes and was a very good judge of people. She was never fooled. Or if she was, it was only because she wanted to be.

'I won't be able to take my stock of booze to Paradise, will I? she used to say. 'So, let's drink it. My deceased husband left it to me. There's some good stuff there. He was a real professional, but I'm only a second-hand bistro-keeper. Here's mud in your eye! And mine!'