Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas

FRENCH COMEDY OF HORRORS

That day, if I’m not mistaken, was the day of the eclipse. We, the friends of Roger Bolamba, had settled down at the House of the Sun, a soda fountain that is, or was, at the curve of the seaside promenade along the stretch officially known as avenue Colonel Goffin. As we waited for the spectacle of the eclipse, we talked about poetry and politics, which was what we always talked about anyway. We had chosen a table next to the window overlooking the cliff, which wasn’t the best seat in the house, but it wasn’t bad either. Though it was true that the waiters hardly paid any attention to us and served us last, Bolamba presided over the table with his usual dignity and we—who were young and inexperienced back then—felt like princes.

Next to our table was a guy in a white cotton blazer, black shirt, and bloodred tie. He was big, six feet tall at least, and he was drinking rum with Guyanita-Cola. With him were two women. One was older, and she was looking all around, as if the festive atmosphere at the House of the Sun scared her. The other was much younger, and every so often she cuddled up to the well-dressed guy, whispering words that I couldn’t quite make out.

I remember the guy because when the eclipse started he got up from his table and started to dance, staring straight at the sun (the rest of us were all looking at it through film negatives or special sunglasses, and some of us even had bits of dark glass, probably pieces of beer bottles), and after a few seconds the older woman joined him in a kind of chacona or resbalosa, a galleada maybe or a sombrilla, a dance that was somehow anachronistic but at the same time terrifying, and that, according to Bolamba, was known only deep in the northern rain forests, in other words the poorest and most remote parts of the country, the malarial forests, the half-abandoned villages near the border where dengue and superstition ruled.

But that wasn’t all. On the one hand, the sun was gradually dimming until it went completely black. On the other hand, the well-dressed guy and the older woman were dancing a sombrilla, which sometimes seemed more like a resbalosa, or a chacona (because of the precision of the steps), or a galleada (because of the obscene moves), singing softly and watching the solar show without blinking. They looked like two people possessed, not in a violent way, but in a resigned, bureaucratic way. The girl, oblivious to the eclipse, had eyes only for them, as if their highly predictable spins were the most interesting thing happening. I should also say that of all the people pressing their noses to the glass at the House of the Sun, it’s possible (though I may be presuming too much) that, other than the girl, I was the only one watching what was happening inside as well as out. When the eclipse was over, we all—those of us in Roger Bolamba’s circle, that is—held our breath and clapped. The other patrons followed our lead and the applause was universal and thunderous. Even the well-dressed guy stopped dancing and bowed with a flourish, submissive and sardonic. Just then the older woman cried out.

“I’ve gone blind!” she shouted.

The waiters at the House of the Sun, who were watching the sky from behind tinted glasses, looked at her and laughed. The well-dressed guy patted the air, searching for the body of the older woman, who had sat down on the floor. The girl got up from the table and took him by the hand.

“The eclipse is over,” she said. “Now we can go, love.”

With a jab of my elbow, I alerted my friend David Alan to what was happening behind his back, but after glancing at the three people attracting my attention, he turned back to the otherworldly darkness blowing over the streets and hills of Port Hope. Then the girl helped the older woman up from the floor, calling her mamá, mother, life-giver, madam, señora, sainted lady, as tears spilled down her cheeks. What an absurd performance, I remember thinking. The well-dressed guy, sitting at the table again, wound a shiny wristwatch, which certainly didn’t look cheap. I turned away. The sea below had suddenly grown calm and the tide, according to Roger Bolamba, didn’t know whether to come in or go out. We heard a dog bark. Past the cliff, where the promenade runs along the beach, we saw a man walk into the water and then swim out to the buoy. The buildings on the waterfront seemed to have shifted, tilting slightly toward the south, like psychopathic Towers of Pisa. The few clouds plying the sky of Port Hope had disappeared. A sound like charcoal against dry wood, like stone against gem, imperceptibly scored the air of the capital. Roger Bolamba, who had been the one to invite us to the soda fountain, said that we would watch the next solar eclipse in bathing trunks on the beach, and then we would follow the example of the swimmer who was making his way toward the buoy.

“When is the next eclipse?” asked someone I didn’t recognize.

“Thirty years from now,” said David Alan.

When I turned to look at the well-dressed guy and the women with him, they were gone. Then the sun shone again through the windows and most of us pocketed the devices we had used to protect our eyes from the dangerous rays of the blazing orb (or tossed them on the floor), except for the waiters, who were still wearing their glasses at work five years later, starting a trend that was gradually picked up by hotel waiters, beach restaurant waiters, and finally dance club waiters.

The rest of the afternoon proceeded as usual: somebody wrote a sonnet to the eclipse; somebody compared the eclipse to the state of the arts in our country; somebody said that children conceived during an eclipse were born with birth defects or just flat-out evil, which meant that it wasn’t a good idea to make love during an eclipse, total or partial. Then it was time to pay and we all dug into our pockets. As usual, somebody was out of cash, or didn’t have enough, or hadn’t brought cash with him, and among all of us, democratically, we had to cover what he’d ordered, a beer, a coffee, a dish of pineapple preserves. Nothing very expensive, as you can see, though when you’re poor anything that isn’t free is expensive.

Later, the owner of the soda fountain—who respected Bolamba’s past as an athlete and grudgingly accepted his new literary calling—ordered us to leave, which we did willingly, since there was no air conditioning at the House of the Sun and by then the heat had become unbearable. Our conversation continued at De Gaulle Park, the biggest park in the city, where we sprawled on the green grass that no one had cut for more than a month, as Alcides La Mouette pointed out, because of the strike of city contractors, which included gardeners and caretakers, but not garbagemen, whose work regulations were different. So the grass was taller than usual (much taller) and we lay down in it, Roger Bolamba and the five or six of us who followed him everywhere, as the pot and amphetamine dealers settled on the cement or stone benches that had replaced the original cast-iron benches, which someone had stolen and sold to the rich and cultivated families of our city.

As always, we read aloud the news published in the literary section of the Port Hope Monitor, dreary news, the names of academics who had gone on to better places, the names of others who were still swarming the basements of the Ministry of External Affairs or the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, occupied with complex heuristic challenges. Alongside them, shining bright, were the young people (though some of these young people were past fifty) who would replace them, though for the moment they spent their time writing about the flora and fauna of our republic. It was they whom Roger Bolamba most hated or envied, because they were of his generation and they were, to a certain extent, those directly responsible for his marginal position in national literary circles. As always, we laughed at their poems, we laughed at their translations (there was one of a German writer that made him sound like a stuttering Creole), we laughed at their reviews, dithyrambic in most cases, affected paeans to the masters with nods to colleagues or friends. Then the sun began to set and a breeze blew from the south and we all went with Bolamba to his house, which was by the port, a little fisherman’s house, where books jostled for space with the cups and medals that our mentor had won over the course of his long athletic career.

There, as usual, he poured us each a shot of rum, which we downed in a single gulp, and then, also as usual, we piled our hands over Bolamba’s outstretched hands and shouted:

“To victory!”

Then we left and let our teacher rest.

But that night, a kind of melancholy shone weakly in my comrades’ eyes, as if the Bolambaesque cheer wasn’t enough, or as if we were getting older. Alcides La Mouette put it plainly.

“Where will we be fifteen years from now? Where will we be thirty years from now, when the next eclipse comes to Port Hope? We’ll be working in pharmacies, as clerks, or we’ll have left for the provinces to lead miserable lives. We’ll have children and aches and pains. No one will write. And this shit country will be just the same as it is now.”

“Not the same,” said David Alan. “Probably worse. Much worse, even.”

“Then we won’t be alive,” I said, “because if the country gets any worse we’ll have no choice but to head for the rain forest.”

“Maybe so,” said David Alan.

We had reached the center of the city and the neon signs shaded my friends’ faces yellow, then blue, then red. We shook hands formally and parted ways. I started for the Coves, which was where my mother had a stand selling fried fish, yucca, and beans. Alan and La Mouette headed to New Town, which was a workers’ housing complex that a Belgian architect had built ten years ago on the edge of the city, next to two mills; it was already falling down. As I walked, I started to whistle a popular song. Then I passed some white kids, who must have been tourists though they didn’t look like it, and I composed a poem in my head about human solidarity, more powerful than race or nationality. The white kids, one girl among them, got into a Cadillac convertible and peeled off, making the tires squeal. I stood there watching the trail of exhaust they left until they disappeared down avenue de l’Indépendance. When I got to the stop, my bus was long gone and I decided to save the money and walk.

I don’t know why, but I resolved to take a shortcut (or what I thought was a shortcut) through the hills. I had never gone that way before. Whenever I was on foot, I walked along rue du Commerce, where the thronging masses were up and about until late. Maybe that particular night I wasn’t in the mood for thronging masses; maybe I wanted to try a new route; maybe I wanted to breathe the fresher air of the upper reaches of Port Hope.

All I know for sure is that instead of turning right toward the sea, I turned left onto a fairly wide street running uphill, almost imperceptibly at first. I can’t remember what it was called. After a while, the palm trees to either side of the street vanished, replaced by pines, big royal pines that towered in the night. The sounds of the city vanished too and all that was left was the muted rumble of a few cars and the chorus of night birds calling to one another. I recognized the heehee bird, which seems to be laughing at everyone, and I thought I also made out the call of the radiator bird, whose song or cry is full of ennui.

Then I passed a gas station that still had all its lights on but where I didn’t see a single person. I noticed this immediately and was a little alarmed, since in those days gas station robberies were a common occurrence, according to the papers. I walked faster and, when I had left the gas station behind, I realized that the road was getting steeper and there were fences on either side now instead of houses, as if the land had only just been parceled out. Each lot had a different fence. The side streets weren’t paved.

When I got to the top of the hill I saw the sea and the lights of the port and the traffic along the promenade. I didn’t see the lights of the Coves, which was on the other side of the bay, on the banks of the Coconut River. For a second, I thought that my sense of direction had abandoned me. But I was sure that if I kept walking and got over the second hill I’d soon be in the Old Hospital neighborhood, which I knew like the palm of my hand, and from there it was steps to the beach.

So I kept walking until I reached a lush plaza, full of trees and big dark plants that made strange sounds in the breeze. As if they were talking. As if they were all mulling over the same story. As if the eclipse, which wouldn’t come again for another thirty years, had settled permanently in their leaves. And I heard the heehee bird again. It was calling to another bird, or so I guessed, but there was no answer. Hee hee, hee hee, hee hee, from the top of a pine. And then the silent wait. No answer. Then the bird called again and waited again, and again the same result. It was still in good humor despite the fruitlessness of its call, I mused. It must be laughing at itself, not at anyone listening to it. Then, without thinking, I answered it.

“Hee hee,” I said, under my breath at first, like a shy heehee bird, then louder, until I hit the right pitch.

The silence that fell suddenly over the plaza gave me goose bumps. It wasn’t just that the heehee bird didn’t answer, it was as if all the plants were turning to look at me. Feeling watched didn’t discourage me and I called to the bird again in its own tongue, which consisted of just two syllables, meaning that any verbal nuance must come from the tone in which they were uttered. Maybe, I said to myself, the heehee bird’s hee hee meant I’m alone, I want a girl bird, or I’m ready and waiting, I want a girl bird, and my answering hee hee might mean I’m going to kill you, I’m going to rip you to pieces, I want your feathers, say, or I want your guts.

As might have been expected, there was no answer. I imagined the heehee bird hidden on some branch, watching me with a sardonic smile on its beak, the smile of an old joker with the words trickery and blood hanging from it like worms. On the other side of the plaza, the street split in two. Mentally I asked the bird to forgive me for the joke I had just played on it and I turned down the street to the right, which was possibly better lit than the street on the left.

At first the street went downhill, but after a while it leveled off. The houses were big and each had a yard and a garage, though some late-model cars were parked along the curb. The street smelled like freshly watered plants. The grass in the yards looked neatly cut—unlike, say, the grass at De Gaulle Park. Every few feet there was a streetlight and, as if that weren’t light enough, almost every house had a little porch lamp wreathed in mosquitoes and moths. Through a few windows, I caught glimpses of people up late talking, or watching the late shows on TV, though my general sense was that most of the street’s residents were asleep already.

I walked faster. Across the street, next to a streetlight and an enormous pine, there was a telephone booth. I remember I thought it was strange, even ludicrous, to see a telephone booth in a neighborhood where everybody surely had phones at home. The public telephone nearest to us was more than three blocks away and most of the time it didn’t work, so when my mother or I needed to make a phone call we had to walk at least six blocks to the next phone, which was on rue du Vélodrome, by the seafood stands. Just then, as I was walking along the opposite sidewalk, the phone rang.

I slowed down but didn’t stop. I heard the first ring clearly, then the second. I imagined that a boy or a girl would come running across one of those verdant yards to answer it. The third ring sent a shiver through me, then came the fourth and the fifth and I stopped. For an instant, I thought that the noise would wake up the neighbors and they would see me walking down their street, a stranger whom they would probably take for a thief. The phone rang for the sixth time, then the seventh. I ran across the street. When I got to the other side, I stopped and imagined that it would stop ringing, but then came the eighth and the ninth ring, magnified. Before the phone could ring for the tenth time, I slid into the booth and picked up the receiver.

“Who is it?” asked a voice that didn’t sound south Guianan or central Guianan, much less north Guianan.

“Me,” I said, stupidly.

“Good, very good. What’s your name?” The voice didn’t have a French accent either. We were speaking in French, of course, but it didn’t sound like the voice of someone from France. It might have been the voice of a Pole speaking French, say, or a Serb speaking French.

“Diodorus Pilon.”

“Diodorus of Sicily? Nice name, very original,” said the voice. “Wait a minute, I’m going to write it down.” I heard a kind of laugh and I guessed it was a joke. “All right, Diodorus, you’re young and you’re a poet, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me how old you are, if you don’t mind.”

“Seventeen.”

“Do you have a book out yet? Have you published poems in a literary magazine? Newspapers, broadsheets, bulletins, literary supplements, church newsletters?”

“Actually, no. None of my poems have ever been published.”

“Do you have a book in the works? Do you have plans to publish something—anything—soon?”

“No.”

“Okay, okay. Wait a minute, Diodorus, don’t hang up…”

I heard a crunch. As if someone had split a slender plank of wood with one blow. I heard static. Muffled curses and grumbling. Then silence. Outside of the booth, in the street, everything seemed normal. I imagined the neighbors and their children sleeping. I imagined kids who lived on that street I had never seen before. I saw them coming out in the morning on their way to school or college, dressed in miniskirts or prestigious uniforms. I thought about my mother, who was waiting for me at the Coves.

“Do you have any idea who I am, Diodorus?” asked the voice all of a sudden.

“No.”

“Not the slightest idea?”

“Maybe this is a joke,” I ventured.

“Not even close. This isn’t a joke. You really don’t have the slightest idea why we’ve called you?”

“You didn’t actually call me. I was just passing by, and I happened to pick up the phone.”

“No, Diodorus. We were calling you. We knew that if you were walking by a phone and it rang, you would answer it. We’ve called lots of public phones, of course. All of the phones on the four or five routes you might have taken tonight.”

“This is the first time I’ve been on this street.”

“It’s called Elm Street. Though I don’t think there are any elms on it.”

“You’re right, there are only pines.”

“But it’s a pretty street. Anyway. Let me ask you the same question again. Do you have any idea who we are?”

“No,” I confessed.

“Would you like to know? Do you want to hear our proposal?”

“I’m dying to hear it,” I said.

“We belong… No, ‘belong’ isn’t the right word, because we don’t belong to anyone or anything… We really only belong to ourselves. And sometimes, Diodorus, even that isn’t certain. Do I sound a trifle moralistic?” he asked, after a moment of reflection.

“Not at all. I agree completely with everything you’ve said. Man belongs only to himself.”

“Well, that’s not quite it, but close. I think we’ve gotten a little off track.”

“You were going to tell me the name of your organization,” I said, helpfully.

“Oh yes. We’re the Clandestine Surrealist Group.”

“The Clandestine Surrealist Group.”

“Or the Surrealist Group in Clandestinity. The CSG, for short.”

“Do you belong to the CSG?” I shouted in excitement.

“Let’s say that I serve in the CSG. Have you ever heard of us?”

“Honestly, no.”

“Not many people have, Diodorus, that’s part of our strategy. I know you’ve heard of surrealism, haven’t you?”

“Of course. My mentor, Roger Bolamba, was a friend of the great south Guianan poet Régis Saint-Clair, about whom Breton said: ‘His horse is the night.’”

“Is that true?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wait a minute, Diodorus, don’t hang up.”

I heard a voice cursing in a language that definitely wasn’t French. It had to be some Slavic or Balkan language.

“Régis Saint-Clair… Saint-Clair, Saint-Clair, Saint-Clair… I’ve got it. South Guianan poet, member of the surrealists from 1946 to 1950. Born at Shark Point, lived many years in Africa. Author of some twenty books celebrating negritude, Creole food, the mental landscape of exile… The mental landscape of exile—who wrote that, I’d like to know… At the end of his career he returns to south Guiana, where he’s head of the National Library… Dies of natural causes at his Shark Point home. Is that the man?”

“Yes, sir. Régis Saint-Clair.”

“And you say he was a friend of your mentor, what was his name, Bolamba?”

“Roger Bolamba. They were as close as dirt and fingernail. Pardon the expression.”

“Bury your mentors, Diodorus. Now that you’re seventeen, I’d say that the moment has come.”

“I’ll think about it, sir,” I said, very excited for some reason.

“Now, where were we? You were saying that you’re familiar with surrealism, is that right?”

“The best poets in the world,” I said with conviction.

“Not just poets, Diodorus, painters and filmmakers too.”

“I love Buñuel.”

“But especially revolutionaries, Diodorus. Now listen up. There are prophets, seers, sages, sorcerers, necromancers, mediums. But those are really only disguises. Sometimes good disguises and sometimes clumsy disguises. But disguises all the same, do you follow me?”

“I follow you,” I said, uncertainly.

“And what do these disguises hide? They hide revolutionaries. Because that’s what it’s all about, do you see?”

“Yes,” I said. “Revolutionaries hide to make revolution.”

“No,” said the voice. “The revolution is made without disguises. Revolutionaries hide to prepare for revolution.”

“I understand.”

“And broadly speaking, that’s what the Clandestine Surrealist Group is. A surrealist group that nobody knows anything about. We need publicity,” he said, and he started to laugh. He didn’t laugh like a Frenchman but like a Pole or a Russian who has been living in Paris for a long time. “And that explains this sort-of proselytism, though that’s not quite the right word for it, this sort-of selection process, shall we say, that we conduct through phone calls.”

“So what about surrealism? The… official surrealism? Why doesn’t it take charge of the selection process?” I asked.

“Official surrealism is a whorehouse, Diodorus. The stories I could tell you… Since Breton died, there’s no enduring that crowd. Don’t get me wrong. A few of them are good people, especially some of the widows, the surrealist widows tend to be exceptional people, but the vast majority are absolute twits. If it were up to me I’d hang them all from the lampposts of the Champs-Elysées.”

“I agree,” I said.

“In fact,” said the voice, dreamily, “official surrealism, the usual worthy exceptions aside, is unaware of the existence of the CSG. To give you an idea, imagine a flesh-and-blood person like you or me living in a room, and living in the same room—though I don’t know whether ‘living’ is quite the word—is a ghost. Sharing the same scenery or surroundings. But they don’t see each other. It’s sad. It wasn’t like that at first, I guess. The surrealists and the clandestine surrealists knew one another. Sometimes they were friends. A few played on both teams: surrealists by day and clandestine surrealists by night. They had their in-jokes, the atmosphere was relaxed. Breton himself dropped a hint about the project, in an interview that’s fortunately forgotten today. He said maybe, maybe, maybe the time was coming for surrealism to return to the catacombs. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Luckily no one took him seriously. What were we talking about?”

“About the telephone selection process, I think.”

“It’s our way of recruiting people. We can call anywhere in the world. We have a method for fooling the phone companies and not spending anything on the calls. There are CSG associates who are technology whizzes, Diodorus, and this is only the beginning. Then we mark the phone with certain symbols so it can be used for free by immigrants who want to talk to their families in Senegal or Petit Guiana. We never use that phone again. We’ve got our security measures. Like the urban guerrillas of São Paulo, to give you an idea.”

“I think the urban guerrillas of São Paulo are being killed left and right,” I said.

“What’s killing us, meanwhile, is the heat in summer and the cold in winter. And sometimes boredom, because we’re getting old, and boredom is one of the afflictions of old age. I’m going to tell you a story, Diodorus, listen up. At the end of the fifties or the beginning of the sixties, André Breton invited five young surrealists to his house. Four of these surrealists had just arrived in Paris. The fifth was a Parisian and something of an introvert. In other words, he had hardly any friends, or no friends at all. The young men came to Breton’s house. There was a Russian, an Italian, a German, and a Spaniard. All of them spoke French, of course. In fact, the German spoke better French than the young Frenchman, who, in addition to being an introvert, stuttered and was dyslexic. So there they are at Breton’s house, these five young men, the oldest twenty-two and the youngest eighteen. They’re a little bit surprised because Breton’s wife and his daughter aren’t there, nor are any of the famous surrealists. Famous to the enthusiastic young men, at least, maybe for having published a poem in some magazine that only bibliophiles remember today, or some so-called surrealist collection since fallen into oblivion. You know, the court of mediocrities that kings must suffer.”

“But Breton wasn’t a king,” I protested.

“You’re right, he wasn’t. A chancellor, then. Or Minister of Foreign Affairs, agreed?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Listen up. Here we have these five young men and all of a sudden Breton appears. He greets each of them by name. He acts as if he knows them very well. He asks them questions. He nods. The young men are just as he had imagined. They spend the afternoon together. Then they go out to eat. They wander the streets of Paris. A Paris that is dying, Diodorus, a Paris whose scepter shines on the other side of the ocean, in New York. But they walk the streets of Paris and talk about everything. The young men feel urgency in Breton’s words, the radiance of a plan that has yet to be revealed to them. Finally, they go into a café, any old café, where Breton asks whether they’re willing to go down into the sewers and live there for ten years. The young men think Breton is speaking figuratively. He repeats the question. The young men reply with other questions. What kind of sewers? The sewers of Paris? The sewers of the mind? The sewers of art? Breton doesn’t answer. They drink. They talk about other things. Then they pay and go out. They’re lost again in the maze of a bustling old neighborhood. Suddenly, in a side street full of the graffiti of minor political groups, Breton indicates a wooden door and they go into a room. It looks like a toy maker’s warehouse. The room has a door that leads to another room, which in turn has a door that leads to another room. And so on. The young men even spot fishing gear along the way. Breton has a bundle of keys that he uses to open all the doors. Finally, they reach the last room. Here the only door is the one they’ve come through. But then Breton leads them into a corner and opens a trapdoor. They climb down. First Breton, who picks up a flashlight hanging by the top steps, and then the five young men. They reach an octagonal room. Surprised, they hear the rush of water, confirming that they’re inside the Paris sewer system. On the walls of the room, a painter or mongoloid child has drawn some chalk figures half-blotted out by the damp. Breton asks again whether they’re prepared to live for ten years in the sewers. The young men listen, their eyes on his, and then they look again at the chalk drawings. They all say yes. They leave the room with Breton in the lead once more. When they reach the first room—or the last, depending how you look at it; the one that looks like a toy maker’s warehouse—he takes four sets of keys out of a box and presents them to four of the young men, giving his own set to the fifth. Then he shakes each of their hands and says goodbye. The young men are left alone. For a few seconds, they stand there motionless, staring at each other. Then the Russian locks the door and they return to the sewers.”

Suddenly the man who was talking on the other end of the line, the man calling from Paris, was silent, as if describing this scene (or remembering it, maybe) had exhausted him. I could hear him breathing. I thought he was having some kind of asthma attack, or heart attack.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Perfectly fine… Perfectly fine…”

Then he coughed or cleared his throat noisily and was silent again. After a few seconds, he began to hum a tune, some French pop song that had yet to reach Guiana, where music arrived from the United States before it arrived from France or Italy or Germany, if music even existed in those countries.

“Where were we?” he asked suddenly.

“With the young men who decided to stay in the sewers.”

“Of course. Listen up. Those young men stay in the sewers and form the nucleus of the Clandestine Surrealist Group. Of course, they can come out whenever they want. Did I tell you that each of them has a set of keys that will let them exit at any time?”

“Yes.”

“In other words, they aren’t prisoners. No one is in charge. They realize this immediately. Not even Breton, who gives away his own set of keys before he leaves. They’re free to leave, go back to their garrets, take a train and lose themselves forever in the stations of Europe. In fact, some nights they do go out. They’re young. They’re more or less able-bodied. They have needs that can’t be satisfied in the sewers. Sometimes they attend gatherings with the surrealists and they shake Breton’s hand. He’s cordial with them, as attentive as ever, but they never talk about the CSG. Breton sees them but doesn’t see them. Breton remembers them but doesn’t remember them. They meet people, of course. They meet Nora Mitrani, who sees them but doesn’t see them. They meet Alain Jouffroy, who sees them but doesn’t see them. They talk to Joyce Mansour. Joyce Mansour sees them but doesn’t see them. Not that it matters to her. Well, she fucks one of them. You have no idea, Diodorus, how beautiful Joyce Mansour was. They talk to José Pierre, Roberto Matta, Jean Schuster, sometimes they get to be friendly with them, the point is, they have a social life, they go to the movies, they join a gym and learn how to box, they sleep with girls, one of them sleeps with boys, sometimes in summer they take trips to the Adriatic or the Norwegian fjords. Don’t get the wrong impression: they don’t do all of this together, certainly not, each of them has his own set of keys, they go out on their own, sometimes they might go months without seeing one another, because the sewers are as big as Paris, an inside-out Paris, except that in this private Paris, instead of citizens there are the waste products of citizens, their excreta, their urine, their tears, their sweat, their semen, their vomit, their fetuses, their blood, in other words, the shadow of those citizens, their tenacious shadow, one might add, and the only risk that our five young men run in their investigations—and it’s a small risk—is coming across groups of municipal employees, sewer inspectors, drain decloggers who regularly venture down into the labyrinthine city and who are very easy to detect, because the decloggers are afraid of the methane gases that accumulate in blind galleries and they take great precautions. Their shouts, Diodorus, can be heard miles away. The shouts of the decloggers. Their laughter, their jokes, their eagerness to finish the work and get out. Our young men, meanwhile, are in no hurry at all. They know that their work will never be finished. That’s why in the summer they run off without a peep. There is one rule that they agree to follow, though they don’t always stick to it. Like in hospitals, one person must always be on guard. Four go out, one stays behind. No big deal. The one who stays behind keeps working. And so do those who go out, in some sense. And so the work, the project, begins to take shape, branches, grows, though not in linear fashion. It’s like a novel, to give you some sense, a novel that doesn’t begin at the beginning. In fact, Diodorus, it’s a novel (like all novels, really) that doesn’t begin in the novel, in the book-object that contains it, understand? Its first pages are in some other book, or in a back alley where a crime has been committed, or in a bird that watches a group of children playing, unseen.”

“Clear as day,” I said.

“Which means that our young men discover that they can be away from the sewers as much as they like. The work travels with them. They can be tourists, go to Greece or the Philippines, they can spend weeks paddling the Amazon, what a delight to paddle the Amazon with eyes half-shut, life sighing and creaking around you; to sleep in hammocks, listening to women talking to little girls in Portuguese. In fact, Diodorus, listen up, the five young men soon discover that it isn’t necessary to live in the sewers of Paris. It’s enough to visit one day a month. And yet the sewer system has become a well-furnished metaphor for them. They have their workshops there, their studies, their libraries. They discuss the possibility of leaving, of course. Each of them proposes a different place. But in the end, they stay. Oh, woe is me, in the end, they stay.”

For a while I didn’t hear anything. I got the sense that the man on the other end of the line had begun to cry or that he was sighing one sigh after another.

“Where do you think they get the money to lead this life, to live like pashas and bums?” he asked suddenly with renewed vigor.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“The same question was on their minds back then. Because they had money, I can promise you that. Once a month, in one of the rooms on the way to their lair, they would find an envelope containing a not insignificant sum that they divided among the five of them. At first, the logical thing—because logic, Diodorus, is like a madhouse—was to think that Breton was financing them. The work in which they were immersed was absorbing and soon they stopped thinking about it. All they knew for certain was that they had more than enough money to support themselves and to indulge in some Oriental luxuries, though at this point in the story two of them were living practically like clochards. But in 1966, Breton dies and for the first few months they speculate about the possibility that their funding will dry up. The money, however, continues to arrive punctually. So they raise the question again. Who is paying? Who is financing them? Who has an interest in seeing their work continue? Naturally, their thoughts turn to the CIA, the KGB, the French Ministry of Culture. After a quick examination of these possibilities, they rule them out as absurd. The group is clearly opposed to the KGB and the CIA. For several nights after dinner, as they smoke and drink cognac or whiskey, they speculate that the Minister of Culture has gone mad. Try to imagine: these young men spend the day alone, apart, working in the mysterious boulevards and streets of the sewers, and when night falls they turn on their flashlights and walk, maybe whistling as they go, to the first room they glimpsed, the room that Breton showed them. Here they shower, or not; they change clothes, or not; and they sit down at the table. One of them serves as cook. Usually it’s the Frenchman, the Italian, or the Spaniard. Sometimes—rarely—it’s the Russian. Never the German. Also, it isn’t a regular occurrence. It only happens when they have something urgent to discuss, a nightmare to explain, for example, or the last piece of a puzzle to find. Someone is financing them. That someone isn’t Breton, since he’s dead. Nor is it an American or Soviet spy agency. But someone is in on their secret and possesses a set of keys, since the money isn’t found under the door of the toy warehouse but in an inner room, which can only be reached by going through two or three locked doors. For days they ponder the mystery. They lie in wait for the visitor, they set traps for him, they hide inside a wardrobe waiting for him to come. But their capitalist partner, who seems to have a special sense for detecting their presence, doesn’t fall into any of the traps. They build a curious system of mirrors by which they intend to get a glimpse of him, and which essentially involves bouncing a reflection from one mirror to another through a keyhole. Finally, after all their attempts fail, they watch a detective movie and realize that the solution is as simple as installing a movie camera in a hidden spot. And they obtain satisfactory results, Diodorus.”

“What are the results? Who is bringing them the money?” I asked.

“A woman. An older woman. The picture is a little out of focus. After they develop the film, all they see is a door opening and a woman dressed in black, her face covered with a silk veil, taking two small steps and removing an envelope from a bag. Then the woman retreats, and that’s all. The next month, they install two cameras. Same scene, but longer and with one fundamental difference. The woman who enters is dressed in black, her face covered with a veil, but it isn’t the woman from the month before. It’s a different person. Shorter, maybe; heavier and less quick. Suddenly, our five young men realize that everything, the female backers included, are part of the same project. They keep filming. The woman who turns up in the third month is extremely tall, wearing black pants and a black turtleneck sweater. Instead of a hat, she has on a beret. There is a black satin handkerchief over her face, not a veil. In the fourth month, it’s a little old lady who can barely stand upright, though she carries herself with pride and a certain style—call it the smoldering embers of style. Her dress is black, her face is covered with black tulle, her parchment-like wrists display bracelets of incalculable value. In the fifth month, the woman is young, though by the way she walks—the young men watch over and over again, like children spellbound by a western—her experience with love and maybe crime too, is plain. This woman is wearing dark glasses instead of a veil and this permits them to divine the deadly iciness of her gaze. Her gaze, we might add, is her cheekbones and lips. In the sixth month, the woman is wearing dark glasses too and the rest of her face and head are covered with a turban. She is tall and her movements are precise, though there is something shy about her. When she leaves the envelope of money, the young men notice her hands and realize that she is black. In the seventh month, the woman arrives singing. She interrupts her ditty only to bring a handkerchief to her nose and blow. The veil is pushed to one side, and she fixes it with the clumsiness of someone who’s had too much to drink. Her black dress is wrinkled and her hat looks as if it’s made of paper. She might very well have slept in her clothes. Her eyes, which the veil can’t conceal, shine with the determination of someone punching and scratching her way down a long corridor of dreams. And so on, until a year has gone by. Then the first woman appears again, followed by the second, and the third, and so on consecutively. At this point, the young men decide to follow them. The project of pursuit is complicated and involves leaving a trail of bread crumbs or pebbles, except that they can’t drop the bread crumbs or pebbles themselves, since the women seem to possess a sixth sense that alerts them to their proximity, so it’s the women who must drop them. After a while this flurry of activity bears fruit. The three women whom they’ve followed turn out to be surrealist widows. Two of them are the widows of painters whose work is rising in value on the international market. The third is the widow of a poet possessing a large family fortune. When they follow the fourth, it turns out that she too is the widow of a painter. They find the others by means of a much simpler system: they track down the surrealists who left lots of money when they died and then they go in search of the widows. The next step is to turn up at the house of one of these widows and interrogate her about why the women are covering their expenses, but they decide not to take this step, because somehow they feel the time is not yet right. Once this problem has been solved, they immerse themselves in their work again. In their masterwork. Do you know what that masterwork is, Diodorus?”

“I have a vague idea, sir. Preparing the revolution? Laying the foundation for the literature of the future?” These must be the right questions to ask, I thought. I didn’t want to look like an idiot. I didn’t want this man who had called me from Paris to decide all of a sudden that I wasn’t a viable contender and hang up on me.

“Cold, cold, but also hot, hot.” The voice seemed to recede, as if all of a sudden doors were beginning to close between my interlocutor and me, one after the other, blown shut by a hurricane wind that not only made him shrink but also literally made my hearing dwindle, so that I put a hand up to my ear pressed to the telephone and felt it: it was still the same size, only much hotter than usual.

“I’ll tell you about our masterwork and what we expect you to do in the Clandestine Surrealist Group when you come to join us.”

“When will that be?” I gasped.

My interlocutor’s voice rasped. I heard him spit. I imagined him in an underground gallery, talking on a pirated phone line, his gaze fixed on the river flowing through the gallery toward an enormous treatment system resembling a mill with silver blades.

“In three months. We expect you on July 28, at precisely eight p.m., on the rue de la Réunion, at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Do you have paper and pencil?”

“I have a pen,” I said.

“Well, write this down. July 28. Eight p.m. Rue de la Réunion, Père Lachaise Cemetery. If anything goes wrong, head to the rue du Louvre. Walk from rue Saint-Honoré to rue d’Aboukir. A hunchbacked man will approach you and ask how to get to La Promenade de Vénus. Do you know what La Promenade de Vénus is?”

“No.”

“It’s a café. All right. Listen up. The man with the hunchback will come up to you and ask you where La Promenade de Vénus is. You don’t say anything, you raise a finger to your head and touch it, as if to say that the location of the café is a mental thing. Do you understand? Have you written it all down?”

“Yes.”

“Very well, Diodorus Pilon, that’s all for now.”

“But how will I get to Paris?” I asked.

“By plane or by ship, of course.”

“I don’t have any money,” I almost shouted.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t hear anything. I worried that the sharpness of my cry might have seemed rude.

“Are you still there, sir?” I asked.

“I’m thinking, Diodorus, and I don’t know what to tell you. We can’t send you the ticket from here. We can’t send you money, either. It would be a violation of our security measures. You’ll have to handle getting the ticket. When you’re in Paris, we can cover your costs, but you’ll have to pay for the trip yourself.”

“Don’t worry, sir, I’ll be at Père Lachaise Cemetery on July 28,” I said, somewhat recovered and without a clue where I would get money for the ticket.

“Not at the cemetery, Diodorus, on rue de la Réunion, on rue de la Réunion, for Christ’s sake, get it into your head.”

“On rue de la Réunion, no problem.”

“All right, you have a good life, goodbye.”

And he hung up.

I stood there without moving, not knowing whether to laugh or pinch myself, with the phone in my hand as day began to dawn around me. The light that came in through the glass walls of the phone booth had a tentative pallor, conjuring up the green of the hills and the pearly color of the sea first thing in the morning. It was as if I were inside a transparent submarine, a little submarine that had been down to the bottom of an ocean trench. Now, back on the surface again, I was afraid to open the door and emerge.

A man came out of one of the nearby houses. He was wearing a light-colored suit and carrying his jacket in one hand, in a jaunty yet fastidious way, with a leather briefcase in his other hand. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt. His arms were long and strong, like a professional swimmer’s. Maybe he was a college professor or a government official. He looked at me as if trying to place me and then he got in his car and started it. As he passed the phone booth, he turned to stare at me and I returned his gaze. When the car was gone I came out of the booth and set off for the Coves. By now my poor mother would be gone, but I felt like taking a walk before I went home.

As I headed downhill through the Old Hospital neighborhood, I saw a man I knew by sight—a big black man with a beaked nose who sometimes played guitar in the port bars or De Gaulle Park—standing in a phone booth, listening without saying a word, and sweating rivers.

All the beach stands were shut. The sand, which later in the day would be yellow, now looked as if it was covered by a white sheet or a shroud of ash, depending on the spot. I ran into a drunk, someone to whom my mother would give plates of fried fish. He had just woken up.

“Hey kid, what are you doing out so early in the morning?” he asked.

“I haven’t been to bed yet, Achille,” I said.

I sat down next to him on the seawall and listened to his stories for a while. He told me that the night before, as I was talking on the phone to Paris, a cat had gone crazy and had to be shot and killed. He said that the eclipse thing wasn’t such a big deal and that people were always getting excited about nothing. In his opinion, true and incredible things happened in the sky every day, but all a man needed was a good woman by his side. You could do without everything else, except that. As we talked, I saw three figures appear at the other end of the street, weaving along. I thought they must be drunks, maybe friends of Achille, in search of a bed or a hospital. As they got closer, I realized that it was the well-dressed guy who had danced at the House of the Sun during the eclipse, with the two women. He didn’t look as well-dressed as he had before. His suit was ripped in places and he had lost his tie. The older woman’s clothes were in more or less the same state. Only the girl looked as if she’d had a quiet night. When they reached us, the girl asked if we knew the address of a cheap boardinghouse where they could stay. Achille eyed them curiously and then asked the girl what had happened to the other two.

“They’ve gone blind,” she said.

“How did that happen?” asked Achille.

“They spent too long staring at the black sun,” she said.

“The black sun?”

“The eclipse,” I said.

“Oh, well, that makes sense, then,” said Achille, and he gave the girl an address on avenue Kennedy, where boardinghouses and cheap hostels followed one after the other. “Make sure you tell the owner that Achille sent you,” he said in farewell.