My Year in No Man's Bay (26 page)
It was that fullness of the world, as I had known it during my years off from school, so to speak, in those suburbs of Paris, except that, contrary to my plan, it had no dramatic plot or particular incidents, purely variations, nuances, more and more of them. And nevertheless all that was supposed to appear as interconnected and vibrate, with the intensity of a treasure-hunt story.
Nor were heroes lacking, a group of friends, men as well as women, who, embarked on a common journey, primarily had to serve as eyes, ears, and language for those other stories of the world. In between, the most that would occur would be things like playing cards, dancing, sewing on buttons, or someone sleepwalking, singing an original song, perhaps suggestive of Eichendorff's
Ahnung und Gegenwart.
They all had names from classical antiquity, jumbled up by me so as to seem contemporary.
Ahnung und Gegenwart.
They all had names from classical antiquity, jumbled up by me so as to seem contemporary.
I transposed the quintessential events from the populated hills of the Seine to the region of the Orinoco in Latin America, which I knew only from directories of subject headings. Snowing in Clamart now turned up near the springs in the mountainous region of Guyana, although there,
so close to the equator, it had probably never snowed. Borrowing from the rivulet that emerged from the woods at the foot of the menhirâand immediately ran dry againâI described the origin of the mighty river. The people on the clay path near my inn in the clearing became Indios following a trail through the rain forest.
so close to the equator, it had probably never snowed. Borrowing from the rivulet that emerged from the woods at the foot of the menhirâand immediately ran dry againâI described the origin of the mighty river. The people on the clay path near my inn in the clearing became Indios following a trail through the rain forest.
And the journey on foot was to end at that bifurcation of the Orinoco that obsessed me even in my dreams, where the river, in midcourse, for as yet unexplained reasons, split and went rushing off in opposite directions.
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ever during the writing had there been any thought of its earning money. And here, after the first sentences, it became unimaginable that this story, if I ever brought it to a conclusion, would be read by so much as a single person, and that did push me into forlornness. As I forged ahead, all the more stubbornly, I forgot this thought at first and then found myself enjoying a new kind of freedom.
ever during the writing had there been any thought of its earning money. And here, after the first sentences, it became unimaginable that this story, if I ever brought it to a conclusion, would be read by so much as a single person, and that did push me into forlornness. As I forged ahead, all the more stubbornly, I forgot this thought at first and then found myself enjoying a new kind of freedom.
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or a long time I continued in this way, sitting at my table. Even when I did nothing but wait, there was this sense of symmetry, with the snowflake dissolving on the edge of the balcony, with the strip of condensation behind that. It seemed as if I were ridding myself once and for all of my impatience, and finding my own speed.
or a long time I continued in this way, sitting at my table. Even when I did nothing but wait, there was this sense of symmetry, with the snowflake dissolving on the edge of the balcony, with the strip of condensation behind that. It seemed as if I were ridding myself once and for all of my impatience, and finding my own speed.
And because it was so unprecedented, I can say this: I was there, word for word, in time, as if this were my place.
Quite often, too, the thought came to me that no one had ever experienced any such thing; with me something altogether new was beginning.
In place of my forgotten body I felt a sensuality that I liked because it was simply there, without wanting anything. And then again I became strangely conscious of my body, as a whole, the way usually only a part of the body, a tooth, an ear, a foot, enters one's consciousness, as a bothersome weight, or sometimes an absence of sensation, just before an incredible pain manifests itself there. Along with this freedom I experienced daily an equally new type of anxiety.
What made me anxious was my impression that in the process of
being written down the material I was narrating was not expanding, but shrinking more and more, not what I had been accustomed to up until then. And besides, I was treading water with my story: the tour group that was supposed to have set out after only one day at the sources of the Orinoco was still stuck there, with half the rainy season gone and almost two hundred pages. The sentences with which I was circling around them, wanting to do justice to each happeningâheat lightning, the sound of the rapids, the shifting sill of the river, marked by the first shadows of fish downstreamâwere becoming thinner than the air in those parts.
being written down the material I was narrating was not expanding, but shrinking more and more, not what I had been accustomed to up until then. And besides, I was treading water with my story: the tour group that was supposed to have set out after only one day at the sources of the Orinoco was still stuck there, with half the rainy season gone and almost two hundred pages. The sentences with which I was circling around them, wanting to do justice to each happeningâheat lightning, the sound of the rapids, the shifting sill of the river, marked by the first shadows of fish downstreamâwere becoming thinner than the air in those parts.
But it was not permissibleâthat was one of the rules that had emerged in the course of my workâfor a single sentence, once it was on paper, to be revoked, at most a word or two. If there was to be any progress, then only by following the thread of the sentence, becoming more frayed from day to day.
I hoped that simply from fingering and fanning out the phenomena that nature presented I would come to a decision that would enable my heroes and me finally to take a leap and start anew. But another rule was that I could not invent such a decision, whereas every other time I had felt firm ground under my feet only when I was inventing.
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he decision then turned out to be this: one day, in midsentence, my material ran out on me. And with my material for writing, my material for living. I keep brooding over that moment, and to this day do not know why the certainty suddenly came crashing down on me that I had blown my chance and that it was all over. Who can explain it to me? (No one, please.)
he decision then turned out to be this: one day, in midsentence, my material ran out on me. And with my material for writing, my material for living. I keep brooding over that moment, and to this day do not know why the certainty suddenly came crashing down on me that I had blown my chance and that it was all over. Who can explain it to me? (No one, please.)
Those prayer books in boarding school had covered every single day, one saint after the other, and for each a miniature biography in the smallest possible print was supplied: these I had always read all through the Mass, not because they were about saints but because, compressed into all the prayers and invocations of the Lord, whose meaning remained closed to me, were, quite simply, stories. That shows how much I have always craved storytelling.
And now this, too, was closed to me. Even now I still do not know
why I received this breaking of the thread as a verdict of annihilation, executed immediately.
why I received this breaking of the thread as a verdict of annihilation, executed immediately.
And again I fell to the floor, but this time did not go to sleep; instead, I had to get up at once and sit down at my desk.
And for the following months that became the last of the still-usable rules. Even when I did not get out a single line, merely this staying at my desk provided a little bit of certainty. When out walking I epitomized the psalmist from whose abyss no tone issued forth. Running water, always such a reliable help in the past, whether out in the meadows along the Rio Segre or in the shower in my hotel, made me gag. Among the trees in the meadows down by the river wandered the beasts, and in the eyes of the people on the street below lurked yellow-and-black hornets. Wasn't Spain the land of death?
I set out for the so-called Chaos of Targasonne, a desert of crags, intending to get lost or even fall off a cliff, for all I cared. But I did not succeed. I did not get lost, not at all.
And equally in vain I wished I would get sick, or the Third World War would break out, so that I would at least not be so alone with my very own war (previously I had thought that even in a world war, even if my child died, I would go on writing).
And the others sensed the state I was in. My current publisher, who blew in on his way from a book fair in Barcelona to a skiing vacation farther up in Font-Romeu, beat a hasty retreat, fled from the despair I exuded (to that degree he had a good nose), and patently gave up on meâwhich for an evening allowed me to take heart again. I understood him, too, in fact could smell the odor on myself.
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hen something changed, with the couple of sentences by which I eventually moved on.
hen something changed, with the couple of sentences by which I eventually moved on.
First of all a new title for my book thrust itself upon me. From “Prehistoric Forms” it was renamed “The Chimerical World.”
What a wonderful aura or addition emanated from a mere two words when they presented themselves in context. Holding firmly on to that, I was circling far outside with the eagle above the highland plateau.
And moments later, when again nothing happened, I became the fly
lying on its back in the corner of the room and spinning in place. I had just been at the core of the world, and now I was catapulted into an outer space that was really no such thing. One morning I was thinking again that no one had ever experienced anything as glorious as I had, and in the evening of the same day I would have given God knows what to take the place of anyone else, the boil-studded beggar outside the church in Llivia, or a man condemned to death: at least he would have been declared guilty properly.
lying on its back in the corner of the room and spinning in place. I had just been at the core of the world, and now I was catapulted into an outer space that was really no such thing. One morning I was thinking again that no one had ever experienced anything as glorious as I had, and in the evening of the same day I would have given God knows what to take the place of anyone else, the boil-studded beggar outside the church in Llivia, or a man condemned to death: at least he would have been declared guilty properly.
Hour after hour I sat motionless, facing me only that cloud with which there could be no conversation, filled with viper's blood that darted its tongue into me from time to time, and unexpectedly I sat up straight and then traced out word for word the source, still so uncertain, even to the explorers who go out looking for it, of the Orinoco in the mountainous region of Guyana where my story continued to spin its spirals.
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mid this constant back-and-forth, my longing was focused only on the smallest, most ordinary, most everyday things.
mid this constant back-and-forth, my longing was focused only on the smallest, most ordinary, most everyday things.
All I wanted was to be able to bring my son to school again, stand idly on the suburban railway overpass, take my place in line at the post office, the bank, the movies. For the first time I felt a need for salvation. And I visualized it as embodied in everydayness, in its services, manners, and commonplace expressions.
I cursed myself for running away, seeking out an exceptional situation and exclusivity. If my work required that, something was wrong.
But now I likewise had to stay here, could not leave Llivia. Never again will I get out of this damned enclave, I thought again and again, and yet, with the next sentence that got me off dead center, I would have loved to give a party for this heavenly place and all its blessed inhabitants.
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s I fought thus for life, in my own way, day after day, I came to accept myself as never before. I discovered something like a fondness for myself, a kind of brotherliness or friendship with myself.
s I fought thus for life, in my own way, day after day, I came to accept myself as never before. I discovered something like a fondness for myself, a kind of brotherliness or friendship with myself.
It seemed to me that I was no I, no body anymoreâwhich at the
same time was uncannyâand had finally received, as one in need of salvation, what I lacked: a culture; precisely in my near-helplessness a spirit.
same time was uncannyâand had finally received, as one in need of salvation, what I lacked: a culture; precisely in my near-helplessness a spirit.
In this way much that was unthinkable became possible and playable, such that I once even let an itinerant soothsayer tell my fortune. She did not manage to lie in my presence, and foretold for me, holding my unabashedly needy hand in her own warming one, even worse and more worrisome experiences.
And once I sat all day at my desk imagining that at my back a camera for a blockbuster film was set up, and each of the letters I was to type would be projected onto a gigantic screen, before the eyes of a mass audience on all continents. I felt the suspense with which the completion of a word was awaited, groaned in relief with the entire theater when finally the connecting word came, and then, when long after midnight the sentence was concluded with a period the size of a planet, I jumped up from my seat, together with the rest of the world. Nothing could be quieter than another sentence after that, a transition, a ford: no sweeter silence.
I simply had to follow this method of finally forgetting any audience, nodding and rocking my head, so that at the first light of day a page was covered, as had not been the case for weeks, an image in writing. I washed myself in the water of the Pyrenees, full of enthusiasm for this me-without-me, and animated by love for my lot, which was something fundamentally different from acceptance of fate or inner tranquillity. (The peace so indispensable to my work was not foreign to me; yet I have not learned to this day to hold on to it, once achieved.)
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ccupied with writing, I shuddered at the thought of going out into nature. The clanging of the river against the granite sills made me anxious, then even snowflakes bumping against my ear.
ccupied with writing, I shuddered at the thought of going out into nature. The clanging of the river against the granite sills made me anxious, then even snowflakes bumping against my ear.
The very isolation of my study, with its view of the Sierra blue in the distance and the red earthen pyramids in the foreground, also became threatening to me. I moved to a room overlooking the highway, and opened the window, no matter how cold the weather, to the sound of theâunfortunately too infrequentâtrucks and buses, preferably with the rattle of snow chains.
My daily walk, by roundabout routes through the enclave to make it longer, took me not out into nature but instead into the church of Llivia and even more often into the enclave's little museum next door. It was as if I expected to find a sort of way out through contemplation of the objects, for instance the centuries-old apothecary's cabinet displayed there. At least these handcrafted objects made me forget how things stood with me.
And likewise I wanted only light-colored foods; I had a horror of dark ones, for instance venison. For a time my only beverage was milk, with the thought that the viper-blood black would be forced out by the milk white.
But all that worked for only a day, and not even for that. I was cradled by the world, and went to hell. I conjured up a god ex
nihilo,
and then could not find the right word and the consecutive clause for him. I expected help to arrive, kept my eyes peeled for anyone, on earth, in the sky, around the corner, and then I was again the one who said to himself, “Look here, there goes someone who doesn't need anyone!” I wanted to be taken away by one of the airplanes flying over the highlands, then found myself, in order to get another paragraph done, as I had wished, in the cockpit, which, the next time I got stuck, turned out to have no pilot and no instruments. During a storm I placed the manuscript pages by the open window and went off, hoping they would be blown away forever, then rushed back in a panic. At the sight of a butterfly I felt the fluttering of the wings all the way into my heart, at the sight of the next one, the dusty body between the wings appeared to me as that of the perished caterpillar. Who or what was chimerical: the world? the era? I?
nihilo,
and then could not find the right word and the consecutive clause for him. I expected help to arrive, kept my eyes peeled for anyone, on earth, in the sky, around the corner, and then I was again the one who said to himself, “Look here, there goes someone who doesn't need anyone!” I wanted to be taken away by one of the airplanes flying over the highlands, then found myself, in order to get another paragraph done, as I had wished, in the cockpit, which, the next time I got stuck, turned out to have no pilot and no instruments. During a storm I placed the manuscript pages by the open window and went off, hoping they would be blown away forever, then rushed back in a panic. At the sight of a butterfly I felt the fluttering of the wings all the way into my heart, at the sight of the next one, the dusty body between the wings appeared to me as that of the perished caterpillar. Who or what was chimerical: the world? the era? I?
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