Sphinx (11 page)

A*** followed me begrudgingly into the museums in Italy, preferring to enjoy the sea and to tan through long—and, in my opinion, inhuman—sessions. A*** found the cities of the North disappointing and boring, devoid of charm as picturesque as that of the Alps. In Berlin, as in London, we went to the opera as well as to some classical concerts, which for A*** were mere social occasions, failing to incite any profound interest. The only things that provided A*** with an unfeigned pleasure were walks through the streets, from café to café, from fashion boutique to jeweler's.

New York was less boring, because it was a familiar city where A*** could demonstrate superiority over me. We experienced an extraordinary resurgence of our passion; the city's power and excitement infiltrated
us just as it had during our first visit. It was summer, and the heat, not too excessive, made for pleasant walks through the streets. The nights, singularly electric, lured us out. The clubs and bars were crowded with vacationing students who had come to New York to revel in the monstrous buzz of the artistic and cultural scene.

Basking in a renewal of passion for the world, for life, and for our love, we shared secrets, words, and caresses profusely, allowing ourselves to forget all our past hurts and to believe for a moment in an idyll whose state of grace lingered even after we had left its source, that city.

The Eden reopened in September with a brand new show on the billing. A*** was asked to join the new troupe. The rehearsals took up the end of August, with six hours of work a day and up to ten hours in the days preceding the premiere.

We rarely saw each other. During the day, I stayed in to work in my study without going out, while A***, with renewed professional rigor, met the artistic and physical demands of preparation. In the evening, we would eat dinner together and then go to bed very early. The nights when I was working, A***, who had stopped going out, stayed at the apartment. Returning at daybreak, I would go to sleep in the bed that A*** would soon be vacating.

I don't know whether it was A***'s absence or a kind of unhinging, a solitude induced by the disjunction in our lifestyles, that was producing this effect, but clubs were now inspiring only a growing boredom in me, dangerously close to contempt. I was about to turn twenty-three, and for the three years the night crowd had passed before my eyes, I had seen reputations be made and dismantled. I had seen temporary passions transport places and individuals to the apex, and then, burning what they had once adored, those notorious night owls who make up the club scene would abandon them for no apparent reason for other idols destined for a glory just as brief.

It was a never-ending cycle: a new club would open with flashier
décor than ever and resounding, luminous sound equipment more over the top and expensive that anything we had seen before. Always bigger, better, louder, more exclusive and more chichi: the propensity to outdo others governed the cycles of this sparkling microcosm. But behind the circus I discerned only a dreadful repetition; the same shady characters would dominate this market where the figureheads, straw men, and wax mannequins were waltzing to an infernal rhythm. For ages, some thirty individuals, usually vulgar and with unconvincing respectability, would hide behind the scenes and open, close, and resell the clubs, all conceived on the same model. The machine was running on empty, racing, turning out a fortune without producing an iota of delight: no one enjoyed themselves in the least in these clubs, and I started to doubt whether anyone ever had.

Money, reigning despotically, was reducing these places to nothing more than interchangeable settings for dreary prostitution and, to make up for this disgrace, they were rotten with snobbery. The only people seen there, noisily upstaging everyone else, were the
nouveau riche
and the horde of thieves that money draws: dealers, prostitutes, gigolos, and crooks of all calibers. For the sake of appearance or photo opportunities, the crowd was sprinkled with a few celebrities, people who were recognized and idolized.

I could no longer bear the assault of this ambient vulgarity. Behind the simulacrum of festivity and opulence, I witnessed the most sordid trafficking and the seediest machinations, sheepishly disguised. The four months I stayed on in Paris were a calvary for me: the obligatory visits to this cloacum were nauseating. I was being drained by my academic essay whose subject was as far as possible from what I confronted on a daily basis. And finally, I was suffering from the distance I felt growing between A*** and me. We continued to live together, yet we scarcely
spent time together.

Without realizing it, I started longing for my detour via the Eden, those rendezvous from the first days of our relationship, the route that I took every night to the Apocryphe. Disgust at the milieu we now took no pleasure in visiting was gradually surfacing, combining destructively with the loss of substance in our relationship.

We had sealed within ourselves all the dissatisfaction, resentment, and suffering our surroundings had generated. Side by side, we were incubating our grievances. Our relationship suffered profoundly for it: we gave free reign to our mood swings without any creative effort to break through the distance establishing itself between us. A terrible wound opened from all that was eating away at us.

Crisis erupted upon our return from a week spent in New York for the New Year, when we fell once again into the hell we had unknowingly emerged from for a moment. Its abrupt, stifling horror filled us with distress, the same distress walling us in through the dissolution of our love, through a distance that was making us practically strangers to each other. All that the outside inflicted on us resulted in a growing tension, which we never let dissolve in a moribund agreement.

One evening, we turned on each other in the dressing room of the Eden where A*** was getting ready to go on stage. I haphazardly reproached A*** for being cold and uncaring, for being shamefully narcissistic, too. I was reproached in turn for never having asked myself what I really wanted our relationship to be, for never allowing it to run smoothly by fault of never having considered, or taken into account, anything other than an image, other than my singular, and therefore false, vision of A***, with which I had been complacent.

We reached a point of extreme irritation, throwing in each other's face absolutely anything that came to mind. I demanded to know what
was wanted of me, what need I had to satisfy. We only cut ourselves off when a stagehand entered with A***'s costume. Leaving the dressing room, A***, from the door, turned back and hurled this question at me without waiting for a response: “How do you see me, anyway?”

After A*** left, I lingered in the dressing room's usual disorder. My gaze fell upon a large mirror opposite the door, which had slammed shut after the question. I stared at the door's reflection. A response came to my lips, which I murmured pensively in the silence: “I see you in a mirror.”

I was waiting for the show to finish so I could deliver that reply—a reply that gave me an odd satisfaction. It was not quite a reply, in fact: it was an enigma, an obscure sentence, a fragment of an aphorism in the tone of an apocalyptic prophesy. I turned it over and over in my mind, on my lips, and before my eyes without diminishing its charm or unveiling its meaning.

An unexpected uproar pulled me from my lethargic, mesmerized meditation. The show must have been coming to a close, but the rumble that usually accompanied the finale had never taken on such proportions. I got up from the couch and started toward the hallway. On the threshold, I paused for a moment and glanced over my shoulder to glimpse my reflection in the mirror.

I tried to see from the wings what was causing all this commotion. On the stage, at the bottom of the large staircase at the back, was a confused cluster of bodies, some of them almost naked, others in work overalls or in evening wear. Arms, heads, and ostrich feathers were sprouting out of the crowd. Rumbles and indistinct murmurs traveled through the chaotic hall. A firefighter, jostling me, raced onto the stage; the rest of the troupe rushed from the dressing rooms, carrying me in its throng, packing me into the mass. In order to reassure the audience, a stage manager grabbed a microphone to announce that the show had been
momentarily interrupted, and to beseech all those who had no business being on the stage please to clear away. Ebbing, the circle moved aside and, in the interstice between a heap of feathers and the imposing stature of a stagehand, with heartrending terror I saw A***'s body, which I recognized even before having truly discerned it, sprawled and immobile on the ground, with two men trying to place it on a stretcher.

While everyone else evacuated the stage, I approached and followed the stretcher into the wings. They brought the body to the dressing room where a doctor, summoned for the emergency, came bursting in shortly after. I stood next to the lifeless body that in my terror I didn't dare touch—I knew already, obscurely, that a gruesome misfortune I was afraid to name had taken place. Next entered a small group of dancers who came upon hearing the news. The doctor, leaning over the body, straightened up. Seeing that I was watching him, he pronounced his conclusion volubly. Apparently, a break in the cervical spine had provoked an instant and probably painless death.

A murmur rose from the back of the room; the doctor was already on his way out. Some of the dancers, still half-naked, approached the body. They had seen A*** trip, fall headfirst, and violently hurtle down the entire flight of stairs, helpless to resist or direct the fall. At the foot of the stairs, the dislocated body, following a scream that had sprung forth from every mouth, had remained still in the silence of death that preceded the general tumult.

The show was suspended only briefly. They replaced A*** off the cuff with another member of the troupe. The presenter reassured the spectators of the fate of the victim of this regrettable accident, and they redid the finale (which A***'s fall had interrupted) in its entirety. Mourning isn't much suited to venal celebrations. The show was performed two times each night for successive batches of clients, and the second performance
of that night went on as usual, quite naturally and without mishap.

I remained in the dressing room with A***'s body, and the director came to convey his condolences to me and to assure me that he would take care of all the formalities and cover the costs until the insurance money came through. He left, and I found myself again head to head with the cadaver still spread upon the stretcher that had served to transport it, which the two stagehands had set up on a trestle in the middle of the room.

For three hours I stood before this vision of a beloved body I knew to be dead, without the fact resounding in me sufficiently to shift my sentiment or my gaze. To my right, in the mirror on top of the vanity table, was the body's reflection. From my view, due to a frightening effect of perspective, the body's image was foreshortened, from the soles of the feet in the foreground up to the head, which was lost in the distance in a virtual space that swallowed up my gaze, stumbling up against the base of the chin, boring into the gaps of the nostrils, and fading along the line of the eyebrows beyond which the forehead faded away. It was as if this sprawled body in the mirror was looming over my gaze.

A halo of lamps, the sole source of light, framed the mirror and bathed the painting taking shape there in a pale shadow; the reflection was melting A***'s body and my face at its side into one single lividity.

III

From then on I didn't get out of bed until dusk; in the night, my infernal refuge, I indulged in roving fantasies.

A***'s presence was stolen from me by images. While we were together, I was jealous of all that had engrossed A***. I hated the television, detested those frivolous parties and their cortèges of ostentatious, superficial people. All the time stolen from me by those hours spent shopping, at the jeweler's, the hairdresser's, all of that dissipated time. Although, to be fair: some moments of pure pomp had fascinated me as well, the times I watched A***'s body mutate into an image. What price did I pay for them, in suffering? When we lived together, I always interrupted my eternal, languishing reverie to spy on the slow ceremony of applying makeup in the bathroom—the brushstrokes that highlighted the cheekbones, the sharp line of the pencil, the superimposition of different colors on the eyelids to intensify the socket. But I would lose myself in the distance of the gaze, closing myself off in mere vision. Little by little, my gaze, isolated in the mirror—a living enclave—became petrified in the glass facade formed around that face.

Everything stole A***'s presence from me: the infinitely expanding circle of high society friends, A*** playing the role of social butterfly no matter where we went. I salvage crumbs of A***'s presence, captured fragments snatched from the brutal dissipation of that life. From this debris, I recreated an entirely other life, the one I would have liked to live
in A***'s company if it had not been for the seduction of anything and everything that sparkled. The time we spent together was dedicated to this imaginary, deflected, and diverted reconstruction of every act, gesture, and word, with the secret intention of thus being able to appropriate and incorporate A***. The strange sensation of never being able to grasp or embrace A*** except in the painting I was reconstructing from those idealized fragments of real life. The strange temptation to recreate a life in which I had felt only barely included: it seemed as though none of A***'s words or gestures had been for me. I was the shadow of a body that ignored me; I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.