Inside a Pearl (30 page)

He came directly from the game he'd played in, not attended. He had purple lips, pale matte skin, huge eyes, and a freshly scraped knee. He was tall. He was Yugoslavian (the word he used, not Serb or Bosnian or Croatian). He'd been born in France to parents who came from Yugoslavia. Someone told me that Yugoslavs were the best hustlers in Paris but also the most violent. A study had shown they had the biggest dicks.

Etienne was not violent but very pleasant, if somewhat mocking in an adolescent way. He thought of himself as bisexual and for quite a while he had had an African girlfriend. Above all other kinds of women, he prized
une belle black
. That was the word he used, “black,” not
noire
. He told me that girls in Paris were aggressive. Later, after we'd had a number of encounters, I saw two girls, total strangers on the métro, slip him their phone numbers. No wonder. He was tall, well dressed in trendy clothes, had straight, dark hair. He worked at the reception desk of a gym in the
banlieu
where he lived and was allowed to exercise on the machines for free. I could just imagine him joking with the girls. Etienne liked to hang out at heterosexual bars on the boulevard du Montparnasse and at the end of the night scrape up another “straight” guy who hadn't yet teamed up with a woman. He preferred meeting men there to going to a gay bar, where the regulars would have descended on him like piranhas on a baby.

I never questioned Etienne and was just grateful that I was sufficiently old and bulky and foreign, sufficiently “other,” to fall into his comfort zone. I always gave him a bit of money at the end of the evening. He seemed neither to expect it nor to be shocked by it. I offered no explanations, but I thought surely he'd need it for what the French call
arrondir
les fins de mois
, making ends meet at the end of the month—that time between paychecks when most people run short and have bills and rent to pay.

Things
changed over the many years I knew him.
La belle black
vanished one day from his life and his conversation—when I asked him about her he just shrugged. He started to shave his body entirely and he told me he now preferred men who were active rather than passive ones. He still thought of gays as a race apart. Once he stayed in my apartment with a girlfriend when I was traveling and he did a funny imitation of a gay waiter who lisped over him with delight and was openly hostile to his girlfriend. When they asked about desserts, the waiter began listing ice cream flavors: “For Monsieur we have chocolate and vanilla and peach and pistachio,” in a baby-talk lisp—then he turned to Etienne's girlfriend and shouted harshly, “
Et Madame?
”

Dominique Nabokov and I went to Marseilles and interviewed and photographed everyone in that city. The centennial of Victor Hugo's death was 1985 and Edmonde Charles-Roux, the talented and impeccable wife of the Socialist mayor, Gaston Defferre, who was also Mitterrand's minister of the interior, organized a museum exhibition of works by Hugo's descendants. Then she invited them all—and many friends and journalists—to a big banquet at a bookstore called Les Arcenaulx on the Old Port; the low-ceilinged store (now a restaurant) had originally been a naval warehouse built under Louis XIV. I was seated next to a ravishing, elegant blonde, the daughter of a senator. She pointed out her lover at the table of honor, a tall young descendant of Victor Hugo. I felt I was in a novel—seated with a duchess, the beautiful, middle-aged mistress of a Hugo boy.

After we had interviewed everyone and seen everything and spent thousands of
Vogue
's dollars on meals and transportation, I said to Dominique, “There's nothing here. No
Vogue
lady would ever want to come to Marseilles. It's the French equivalent to Akron.” She was quick to agree with me. Marseilles, with its souk all up and down its main street, its frozen then nuked bouillabaisse served in cafés where diners were plagued by beggars, its mafia, its riffraff who joined the Foreign Legion (the office was next to our ugly modern hotel on the Old Port) instead of serving jail time, its hill of old neighborhoods so dangerous that the Nazis,
after
conquering the city, bombed it back into the Stone Age (the only example in history where the conquerors gave up on the captive city and reduced it to rubble)—this Marseilles struck us as
irredeemable, though its partisans kept claiming there was a wonderful hidden Marseilles we hadn't yet discovered.

Edmonde Charles-Roux was one of those perfect French older women who seem to have everything under control. She had worked for Coco Chanel and later written her biography. She'd directed French
Vogue
but parted ways in the sixties when Condé Nast had not permitted her to put a black model on the cover. She'd written a novel that had won the coveted Prix Goncourt, the equivalent to the American Pulitzer or the English Booker. And now she was married to the mayor of Marseilles. Years later, when I interviewed her about her unlikely friendship with Jean Genet, criminal and prostitute, she showed up on time for the meeting in an impeccable Chanel suit, well coiffed and perfectly manicured, her notes arranged so that she could give me the most information in the shortest possible time. While conducting the scores of interviews for the biography, I'd learned that other writers were the best—they remembered colorful details, used specific, nuanced descriptions, and avoided all the “marvelous” and “fabulous” talk. I couldn't help but admire Madame Charles-Roux for her powers of organization and her resolve to do every job, no matter how minor, properly.

From my roost on the Île Saint-Louis, I'd often see the Rothschilds, in their eighties, tottering forth for yet another dinner party—beautifully dressed, slender, on time, impeccable. No wonder these people lived so long with their drive to perfection in everyday life.

Dominique Nabokov and I went to Lyons to interview Pina Bausch, who was one of the most original choreographers of our day and was about to bring her company to the States for the first time to dance at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Having appeared in films by Fellini and Almodóvar, she would later be the subject of Wim Wenders's splendid 3-D
Pina
, shot immediately after her death from archival footage and new sessions with her company. But at the time, I'd never heard of her. We attended rehearsals for a week in a dreary, working-class neighborhood of Lyons before she agreed to see us.

Bausch liked to work with dancers of all ages, sizes, and
nationalities. Her home base was the German industrial city of Wuppertal, where she was first hired to do ballets for the local opera company, though soon she'd formed her own troupe and was doing evening-length original dances. One of these we saw her revive was
Café Müller
, a recollection of her days growing up in her parents' provincial hotel and restaurant.

The women were dressed in heels and dresses, their legs bare and muscular. The men were usually in suits and ties, looking like thirties gangsters. The music was often romantic, sentimental, German ballads or South American tangos. If the clothes and music were decorous, the dancing was violent and confrontational. Women slammed into walls self-destructively and men pulled them away and held them repeatedly. People ran and collided. Sounds and words were emitted, a break with the balletic rule of silence. The dancers were Asian or Mediterranean as well as blond and Germanic.

They were also rehearsing a new piece in which a young woman came out center stage, stopped, and said, “
Bonjour, j'habite Paris
,” what seemed like a thousand times. Bausch, who was seated in the audience, didn't seem to give her any guidance. She just wanted this moment to be repeated again and again, as though this wearisome repetition itself would eventually wear itself down into the right dimensions. The dancer had a very pugnacious way of saying “
J'habite
,” almost as if she were saying, “I beat!”

One of the most interesting things about Bausch's method was the way, one by one, she'd ask her dancers to show her what they did or said when they were anxious, thrilled, or frightened. She'd then take this intimate personal moment and assign it to another performer or to the rest of them, but not to the originator. It was sort of like method acting, in that the director was pulling out of the memory or private repertory of individuals their idiosyncratic expressions of deep feeling, except that the expression was more an action than anything verbal. Certainly repetition seemed to be crucial to her method, too. A man endlessly sets aright chairs that a woman keeps knocking over; a man extends the arms of a second man and drapes a nerveless woman over them, then the arms give way and dump her on the
ground. The interactions often seemed nightmarish and transgressive, violations of decorum, and I couldn't help noticing they were almost all hetero sexual. Rarely did two members of the same sex touch each other.

She liked to play with the elements of earth and water. In one piece, a woman repeatedly shovels dirt on another woman writing on the ground. In another piece the dancers scoop water into buckets, then drench each other. During rehearsals Pina said little, and then only in intimate hushed conferences with individuals. It was like a combination of exercise class and psychotherapy. Her main advice to her performers was “Dig deeper,” as if everything were coming from them, not from her. People compare Pina Bausch to Robert Wilson, but Wilson was never interested in the psychological makeup of his performers, only in stage pictures. They both favored small idiosyncratic hand gestures and beautiful sets, although Wilson's were more beautiful and he designed the lighting as well.

After we waited around for a week in this dreary Lyons neighborhood, we were finally given a time to interview and photograph Pina Bausch: at midnight in a local café filled with noise and smoke. A gay male nanny with a ginger mustache, a German, brought her three-year-old son, Saloman, to her and she nursed him with her flat breast. She said the child's name had come from a gay man who'd designed the sets for
Café Müller
, a man who'd died—while the kid's biological father was just some transitory man she'd slept with. That sounded like the most German thing I'd heard in a while.

Of course, France had its own odd ducks, especially the writers I was meeting—a whole generation of
poètes-maudits
. One was Gabriel Matzneff, an outspoken pedophile who'd written a book called
Less Than Sixteen
(
Les moins de seize ans
) about his attraction to—and adventures with—boys and girls who were under sixteen. He was a bald man who had his gleaming scalp polished at Carita. He was a practicing Russian Orthodox believer. In 1985 I wrote a novel,
Caracole
, and he protested my use of this title in France since he had a 1969 pamphlet called
La Caracole
. My Paris editor immediately backed down, afraid of a lawsuit, and I chose the alternate title
Le héros effarouché
(
The Startled
Hero
), from a Mallarmé poem I used as an epigraph: “Let me introduce myself into your story as the startled hero.”

Matzneff came from a White Russian family and started riding horses at age ten. He majored in classics and studied philosophy with Gilles Deleuze and Vladimir Jankélévitch. He became close to President Mitterrand, who wrote an article testifying to their friendship (imagine Bush or even Obama bearing witness to a friendship with an artist, much less a notorious pedophile). He was considered one of the most original writers of his generation, admired by Mauriac, Aragon, and Julian Green (who became a close friend).

As for his pedophilia, he explained that he was less attracted to males or females than he was to those under sixteen, who for him constituted a third sex. When he first presented these ideas, I think for French readers they had a classical, old-fashioned sound about them. After all, for years there had been a homophile publication in France,
Arcadie
, and André Gide, the Nobel Prize–winning author, had said he was not a homosexual but a boy lover. Loving boys sounded Greek, like something Plato or a bucolic poet might do. Matzneff admitted that sixteen was not an absolute cut-off age for women, although he said he would never have a central relationship with a boy over seventeen. He claimed that the two most sensual beings of his life were a girl of fifteen and a boy of twelve.

When I met Matzneff, he had just been accused of having sexual relations with retarded children at a facility called the Corral. The names of other intellectuals, such as Michel Foucault, René Schérer, and Félix Guattari, were wrongly dragged into the affair. All of the accusations against Matzneff were withdrawn—although seven of the educators at Corral eventually served prison sentences. A young man at Corral raped and murdered a patient there after he'd spent time in a psychiatric hospital. As everyone admitted, it was imprudent to have allowed him to stay at Corral.

Guy Hocquenghem was a killingly handsome young novelist who published a book about the Corral scandal defending his friends, called
Les petits garcons
(
The Little Boys
). Guy, whose curly hair and sharp features impressed everyone, usually wore a sardonic smile. He seemed
fondly contemptuous of everyone. He and his friends were often stoned, and when I visited Guy in his Montmartre apartment, the air was thick with pot smoke. I'd first met him in New York when he was still in his mid-twenties, soon after he'd published his first book,
Homosexual Desire
(1972), which was surely one of the first works of queer theory, along with Dennis Altman's
Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation
(1971).

Hocquenghem was usually with René Schérer, his high school philosophy teacher whom he'd started having an affair with when he was sixteen and Schérer was in his forties. Twenty years later, they were still close friends and they somewhat programmatically called themselves lovers. Schérer was yet another apologist for pedophilia. He was the younger brother of the filmmaker Éric Rohmer. When I knew Schérer, he'd been inculpated in the Corral affair and his career was destroyed. To be sure, in his writing, he'd advocated pedophilia as the point at which the loving adult—who was neither a parent nor an instructor—might help to “liberate” the child from the killing strictures of society and parental control. Schérer had been influenced by Félix Guattari, whose
Anti-Oedipus
(coauthored with Gilles Deleuze) marked an entire generation, and by Charles Fourier, the nineteenth-century utopian philosopher. He championed a closer look at Fourier's previously unpublished
Le nouveau monde amoureux
(
The New World of Loving
), a text that advocated the free expression of everyone's desires.