Last Evenings On Earth

VAGABOND IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM

B has crossed the border into France. In five months of wandering he will spend all the money he has. Ritual sacrifice, gratuitous act, boredom. Sometimes he takes notes, but as a rule he limits himself to reading. What does he read? Detective novels in French, a language he hardly understands, which makes the novels more interesting. Even so, before the last page he always guesses who the murderer is. France is not as dangerous as Spain and B needs to feel that he is in a low-danger zone. B has crossed the border with money to spend because he has received an advance from his publisher, and after putting 60 percent of the sum in his son's bank account he has gone to France because he likes France. Simple as that. He took the train from Barcelona to Perpignan, spent half an hour walking around the Perpignan station, until he felt he had understood what there was to understand; he ate in a restaurant in the city, saw an English movie, and then, as night was falling, took another train, direct to Paris.

In Paris, B stays in a little hotel in the rue Saint-Jacques. The first day he visits the Luxembourg Gardens, sits on a park bench and reads, then goes back to the rue Saint-Jacques, finds a cheap restaurant, and eats there.

The second day, after finishing a novel in which the killer lives in an old people's home (which resembles the world beyond Lewis Carroll's looking glass), he sets off in search of secondhand bookshops and finds one in the rue du Vieux Colombier, where he discovers an old copy of the magazine Luna Park, number 2, a special issue on writing and graphics, with texts or drawings (the texts are drawings and vice versa) by Roberto Altmann, Frederic Baal, Roland Bardies, Jacques Calonne, Carlfriedrich Claus, Mirtha Dermisache, Christian Dotremont, Pierre Guyotat, Brion Gysin, Henri Lefebvre, and Sophie Podolski.

The magazine, edited by Marc Dachy, which comes out or used to come out three times a year, was published in Brussels, by transйdition, and has or had its registered office at number 59, rue Henry van Zuylen. At one time Roberto Altmann was a famous artist. Who remembers Roberto Altmann now? wonders B. The same goes for Carlfriedrich Claus. Pierre Guyotat was a notable author. But there is a difference between notable and memorable. In fact, B once thought he wanted to be like Guyotat, in days gone by, when as a young man he was reading Guyotat's work. That bald, massive individual, Pierre Guyotat, ready to take on all comers and eat them alive in the darkness of an attic room. He doesn't know who Mirtha Dermisache was, but her name rings a bell: possibly a beautiful woman, and almost certainly elegant. Sophie Podolski was a poet whom he and his friend L admired (adored even) back in Mexico, when they were little more than twenty years old. Roland Barthes, well, everyone knows who he is. B has seen Dotre-mont's name somewhere else, perhaps he once read some of his poems in a forgotten anthology. Brion Gysin was a friend of Burroughs, the one who gave him the idea for his cut-ups. And that leaves Henri Lefebvre. The name means nothing to B. And suddenly, in the secondhand bookshop, that name, the only one that means nothing to B, lights up like a match struck in a dark room. Or that is how it feels to B. He would have preferred it to light up like a lamp. And in a cave rather than a dark room, but the fact is that Lefebvre, the name Lefebvre, flares briefly like a match.

So B buys the magazine and loses himself in the streets of Paris, where he has gone precisely to lose himself, to watch the days slip away, and although he'd been imagining the lost days as sunny, as he walks along with the issue of Luna Park in a plastic bag dangling lazily from his hand, that sunny image is cast into shade, as if the old magazine (which is beautifully produced, by the way, and in almost perfect condition in spite of the years and the dust that builds up in secondhand bookshops) had triggered or provoked an eclipse. The eclipse, as B knows, is Henri Lefebvre. It is Henri Lefebvre's relationship with literature. Or, more precisely: his relationship with writing.

After walking aimlessly for many hours, B arrives at his hotel. He feels well. He is relaxed and feels like reading. Earlier, on a bench in the square Louis XVI, he tried to decipher Lefebvre's graphic script. A difficult undertaking. Lefebvre draws his words as if the letters were blades of grass. The words seem to be shifting in the wind, an easterly wind; a field, grass of uneven height, a cone unravelling. As he watches the words (because the first thing he has to do is watch them) B remembers — as if he were seeing it all on a movie screen — faraway fields in the southern hemisphere where his adolescent self is searching desultorily for a four-leaf clover. Then it occurs to him that this memory may actually come from a film and not from real life. The real life of Henri Lefebvre, it seems, was touchingly simple: he was born in Masnuy Saint-Jean in 1925. He died in Brussels in 1973. In other words he died in the year of the military coup in Chile. B tries to remember the year 1973. It is no use. He has walked too far and although he feels relaxed, in fact he is tired and what he needs is food or sleep. But B can't sleep so he goes out to eat. He gets dressed (he is naked though he can't remember taking off his clothes), combs his hair, and goes down to the street. He eats in a restaurant in the rue des Ecoles.

At the next table is a woman who is also eating on her own. They smile at each other and leave the restaurant together. He invites her up to his room. The woman accepts spontaneously. They talk and B observes her as if through a curtain. Although he is listening carefully, he cannot understand much. The woman refers to unrelated events: children playing on swings in a park, an old woman knitting, moving clouds, the silence that reigns, so the physicists tell us, in outer space. A world without noises, she says, in which even death is silent. At some point, just to keep the conversation going, B asks her what she does for a living, and she replies that she is a prostitute. Ah, good, says B. But just for something to say. In fact he doesn't mind one way or the other. When the woman finally falls asleep, he looks for Luna Park, which is lying on the floor, almost under the bed. He reads that Henri Lefebvre, who was born in 1925 and died in 1973, spent his childhood and adolescence in the country. In the deep green fields of Belgium. Then his father died. His mother, Julia Nys, remarried when he was eighteen. His stepfather, a jovial fellow, used to call him Van Gogh. Not because he liked Van Gogh of course, but to make fun of his stepson. Lefebvre moved out to live on his own. But he soon came back to his mother's house and there he stayed until she died in June 1973.

Two or three days after the death of his mother, Henri's body was found beside his desk. Cause of death: a massive overdose of prescription drugs. B gets out of bed, opens the window and looks at the street. After Lefebvre's death, thirty pounds of manuscripts and drawings were discovered. "Very-few publishable texts," says the brief note on the author. In fact, the only thing that Lefebvre published in his lifetime was a critical essay entitled "Phases de la poйsie d'Andrй du Bouchet," under the pseudonym Henri Demasnuy, in Syntheses, number 190, March 1962. B imagines Lefebvre in his hometown of Masnuy Saint-Jean. He imagines him at the age of sixteen, looking at a German army truck, in which there are only two German soldiers, smoking and reading letters. Henri Demasnuy, Henri of Masnuy. When he turns around, the woman is leafing through the magazine. I have to go, she says, without looking at him, still flicking the pages. You can stay here, says B, knowing it's not likely. The woman says neither yes nor no, but after a while she stands up and starts getting dressed.

B spends the following days wandering around the streets of Paris. Sometimes he comes to the entrance of a museum, but he never goes in. Sometimes he comes to a movie theater and stands there examining the posters at length, then walks on. He buys books, which he browses through but never reads to the end. He eats in a different restaurant every time and lingers after his meals, as if he were not in Paris but out in the country and had nothing better to do than smoke and drink chamomile tea.

One morning, after a couple of hours' sleep, B takes a train to Brussels. He has a friend there, a black girl, the daughter of a Chilean exile and a Ugandan woman, but he can't bring himself to call her. He walks around central Brussels for hours and then into the northern suburbs until he finds a little hotel on a street where there is virtually nothing else. Next to the hotel is a fenced-off vacant lot where grass and garbage are thriving. Opposite is a row of mostly unoccupied houses that look as if they have been bombed. Some have broken windows and shutters hanging precariously as if the wind had unhinged them, but there is practically no wind in this street, thinks B, looking out the window of his room. He also thinks: I should rent a car. And: I don't know how to drive. The next day he goes to see his friend. Her name is M and she is living on her own now. He finds her at home, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She is barefoot. When she sees him, for the first few seconds she can't remember who he is. She speaks to him in French and looks at him as if she knows that he is going to do her harm, but doesn't care.

After a moment's hesitation, B says his name. He speaks in Spanish. I'm B, he says. Then M remembers him and smiles, though not because she is particularly happy to see him; it is more that B's sudden appearance, something she hadn't even considered as a possibility, comes as an amusing if perplexing surprise. In any case, she invites him in and offers him a drink. They talk for a while, seated opposite each other. B asks about her mother (her father died a while ago), her studies, her life in Belgium. M replies obliquely and asks about B's health, his books, his life in Spain.

Finally they run out of things to say and sit there in silence. Silence suits M. She is tall, slim, and about twenty-five. Her eyes are green, the same color as her father's. Even the rings under her eyes, which are very pronounced, remind B of the exiled Chilean he met many years ago (he can't remember how many years, nor does it matter) when M was a little girl, about two, and her parents (her mother was studying politics, though she didn't finish her degree) were traveling through France and Spain on a shoestring, staying with friends.

For a moment he imagines the three of them, M's father, her mother, and M at the age of two or three, with her green eyes, surrounded by precarious suspension bridges. Her father was never really a close friend of mine, thinks B. There were never really any bridges, not even precarious ones.

Before leaving, he gives her the name and the telephone number of his hotel. When night comes he walks through the center of Brussels in search of a woman but all he can see are ghostly figures; it's as if the bureaucrats and bank tellers had all stayed late and were just leaving work. When he returns to his hotel he has to wait a long time before someone comes to the door. The porter is a haggard young man. B gives him a tip and climbs the dark staircase to his room.

The next morning he is woken by a phone call from M. She invites him to breakfast. Where? asks B. Wherever, says M. I'll come and pick you up and then we can go somewhere. As he is getting dressed, B thinks of Julia Nys, Le-febvre's mother, who illustrated some of her son's last texts. They lived here, he thinks, in Brussels, in a house somewhere in this part of the city. A gust of wind is blowing in his memory, blurring the houses he has seen. After shaving, B looks out the window at the facades of the neighboring houses. Everything is the same as yesterday. A middle-aged woman, perhaps only a few years older than B, is walking down the street, dragging an empty shopping cart. A few yards in front of her, a dog has stopped, with his muzzle raised and his eyes, like slots in a cash drawer, fixed on one of the hotel's windows, perhaps the one from which B is looking out. Everything is the same as yesterday, thinks B as he puts on a white shirt, a black jacket, and a pair of black trousers. Then he goes downstairs to wait for M in the lobby.

What do you make of this? B asks M, once they are in the car, showing her Lefebvre's pages in Luna Park. It looks like bunches of grapes, says M. Can you read the writing? No, says M. Then she looks at Lefebvre's scribbles again and says that maybe he is talking about existence. maybe. But in fact she is the one who talks about existence that morning. She says her life is one error after another; she tells him that she has been very sick (what with, she doesn't say) and describes a trip to New York that sounds more like a descent into hell. M's Spanish is larded with French and her face remains expressionless throughout the monologue, except when she allows herself a smile to underline the farcical nature of this or that situation, as she sees it, although nothing, thinks B, could be further from farce.

They have breakfast together in a cafй on the rue de l'Orient, near the church of Notre-Dame l'Immaculйe, a church M seems to know well, as if she had recently converted to Catholicism. Then she says she's going to take him to the Natural History Museum, next to Leopold Park and the European Parliament, a location that strikes B as paradoxical — though he can't say why when pressed to explain — but first, M informs him, she has to go home and get changed. B has no desire to visit a museum of any sort. And he can't see why M needs to change her clothes. He says so. M bursts out laughing. I look like a junkie, she says.

While M gets changed, B sits in an armchair and starts leafing through Luna Park, but soon he gets bored, as if Luna Park and M's small apartment were incompatible. So he gets up and starts looking at the photos and pictures on the wall, and then the single, sparsely laden bookshelf and the few Spanish books on it, among which he recognizes the works of M's father, which M, in all likelihood, has never read: political essays, a history of the coup, a book about the Mapuche communities, and B smiles, taken aback, feeling a slight twinge of emotion, though what it is he doesn't know, tenderness perhaps or disgust or simply a warning that something is wrong. Then suddenly M appears in the room or rather she walks across it from her bedroom to what must be the bathroom door, unless it's the laundry where her clothes are hanging, and B watches her cross the room half-naked or half-clothed, a sight which along with her dead father's old books seems to constitute a sign. A sign of what? He doesn't know. An ominous sign, in any case.

When they leave the apartment, M is wearing a dark, close-fitting, knee-length skirt, a white shirt with the top buttons undone, showing some cleavage, and high heels that make her at least an inch taller than B. As they head toward the museum, M talks about her mother and points to a building, which they pass without stopping. B doesn't understand until the building is five blocks behind them: M's mother, the widow of the exiled Chilean, lives there, in one of the apartments. Instead of asking about her, as he would like to, he says he really doesn't feel like visiting a museum, and especially not some awful Natural History Museum, of all things. But his feeble resistance is no match for M, who has suddenly become energetic while retaining a certain frosty air, and he lets himself be dragged along.

Another surprise is waiting for him. When they reach the museum, M pays for the tickets, then sits down to wait for him in the cafй with a newspaper and a cappuccino, her legs crossed in a pose that is at once elegant and solitary, and the sight makes B (who has turned back to look at her) feel old, in a rather abstract way. Then B walks from room to room until he comes to one in which he finds several curvilinear machines. What is going to happen to M? he wonders as he sits down, resting his hands on his knees, with a slight twinge of pain in his chest. He feels like a cigarette, but smoking is prohibited. The pain grows stronger. B shuts his eyes but can still see the silhouettes of the machines, persisting like the pain in his chest, although perhaps they are not machines but bewildering figures, the human race suffering and laughing as it marches toward the void.

When he returns to the museum cafй M is still sitting there with her legs crossed, underlining something in the newspaper with a silver ballpoint pen, probably an ad for a job. As soon as B appears she discreetly folds the paper away. They eat at a restaurant in the rue des Bйguines. M hardly touches her food. She hardly talks either, and when she does, it is to suggest they visit the cemetery together. I often come down this way, she says. B looks at her and makes it clear that he has no desire at all to visit a cemetery. On the way out of the restaurant, however, he asks where the cemetery is. M does not reply. They get into the car and less than three minutes later her hand (a slender and elegant hand, thinks B) is pointing out the Du Karreveld Castle, the Demolen-beek Cemetery, and a sports complex with tennis courts. B laughs. Ms face, by contrast, remains hieratic and impassive. But underneath, thinks B, she is laughing too.

What are you going to do tonight? she asks as she drops him off at his hotel. I don't know, says B, read maybe. For a moment B thinks that M has something to say to him, but she says nothing. That night B does in fact lie down and try to read one of the novels he didn't leave behind in Paris, but after a few pages he gives up and tosses it to the floor. He leaves the hotel. After walking aimlessly for a long time he comes to a part of the city in which there are many colored people. That is what he thinks, that is how he articulates his thought as he sees himself walking through those streets. He has never liked the expression "colored people." So why did that phrase cross his mind? Black people, Asians, North Africans, yes, but not colored people, he thinks. Soon after, he goes into a topless bar. He orders chamomile tea. The waitress looks at him and laughs. She is pretty, about thirty years old, tall and blonde. B laughs too. I'm not well, he says, still laughing. The waitress makes his chamomile tea. That night B sleeps with a black girl who talks in her sleep. Her voice, which B remembers as soft and musical, has become hoarse and querulous, as if at some point during the night, unbeknownst to B, her vocal cords had undergone a transformation. It is, in fact, her voice that wakes him, with the effect of a hammer blow, and then, once he is over the shock, he lies there propped up on one elbow listening for a while, until he decides to wake her up. What were you dreaming about? he asks her. The girl replies that she was dreaming about her mother, who died not long ago. The dead are at peace, thinks B stretching out in the bed. As if she had read his mind, the girl says that no one who has passed through this world is at peace. Not anymore, not ever, she says with total conviction. B feels like crying, but instead he falls asleep. When he wakes up the following morning, he is alone. He does not have breakfast. He stays in his room reading until the cleaning lady asks if she can make the bed. While he is waiting in the lobby, M telephones for him. She asks him what he is planning to do. Before he knows it, M has arranged to come and pick him up.

That day, they visit another museum, as B suspected they might, and then they eat at a restaurant next to a park where packs of children and adolescents are skating. How long are you going to stay here? asks M. B says he is thinking of leaving the next day. And going to Masnuy Saint-Jean, he adds, anticipating M's question. M has no idea what part of Belgium the village is in. Nor do I, says B. If it isn't too far I could drive you, says M. Do you have friends there? B replies in the negative. When they finally go their separate ways outside the hotel, B walks around the district until he finds a pharmacy. He buys condoms. Then he heads toward the topless bar where he went the night before, but although he searches street after street (and gets lost several times in the process) he cannot find it. The next day he has breakfast with M in a roadside restaurant. M tells him that sometimes when she is sad she gets into her car and drives, without having a clear idea where she is headed, just for the pleasure of being on the move. Once, she says, I got to Bremen and I didn't know where I was. All I knew was that I was in Germany, that I had left Brussels that morning and now it was night. And what did you do? asks B, who can guess the answer. I turned around and came back, says M.

In Masnuy Saint-Jean they see cows. Trees. Fallow fields. A prefab shed. Three-story houses. At B's request, M asks an old woman who is selling vegetables and postcards how to get to Julia Nys's house. The old woman shrugs her shoulders, but then starts laughing and launches into a long speech, which B can hear from the car. M and the old woman are both gesturing, as if they were talking about the rain or the weather, thinks B. The house is in the rue Colombier; it has a sizeable, neglected garden and a shed that has been turned into a garage. The walls of the house are yellow and the windowless left half is shaded by a large tree that has not been pruned for a long time. She was crazy, that old bat, says M, it could be this house or any other house in the village. B rings the doorbell, which sounds like a real bell with a clapper. After a while a girl appears, wearing jeans, with wet hair; she's about fifteen. M asks her if this is the house where Julia Nys and her son Henri used to live. The girl says Monsieur and Madame Marteau live here. Since when? asks B. Since always, says the girl. Were you washing your hair? asks M. I was dyeing it, says the girl. A short conversation follows, which B does not understand, and yet, for a moment, M in her high heels on one side of the fence and the girl in her tight jeans on the other seem to be the principal figures in a painting, which initially gives an impression of peace and balance, but then strikes him as deeply disturbing. Later, after exploring the village from north to south and south to north, they go into what seems to be the library. Is this where Henri of Masnuy came to read? It can't be. The library is new and Lefebvre must have frequented the old one, the one that was here before the war. There must have been at least two libraries between Henri's and this one, says M, who is better acquainted with her country's public institutions. For lunch, B has a steak and M a salad, half of which she leaves. I wasn't even born when your friend died, says M nostalgically. He wasn't my friend, says B. But you were alive, says M, with a gently mocking smile. I was traveling when he died, says B.

Later, when all the other customers have left the restaurant, and they are alone at their table by the window, M reads Luna Park 2 and stops at the last page, which announces forthcoming contributions for Luna Park 3 or Luna Park 4, if the fourth number ever saw the light of day. She reads out the list of future contributors: Jean-Jacques Abrahams, Pierrette Berthoud, Sylvano Bussoti, William Burroughs, John Cage, and so on up to Julia Nys, Henri Lefebvre, and Sophie Podolski. An all-star cast, says M with a mocking smile.

They're all dead, thinks B.

And then: What a pity M doesn't smile more often.

You have a beautiful smile, he says. She looks him in the eye. Are you trying to seduce me? No, no, God forbid, murmurs B.

Late in the afternoon they leave the restaurant and go back to the car. Where to? asks M. Brussels, says B. M sits there pensively for a while, then says she doesn't think it's a good idea. All the same, she switches on the ignition. There's nothing more for me to do here, says B. This sentence will pursue him throughout the return journey like the headlights of a phantom car.

When they arrive in Brussels B wants to go back to his hotel. M thinks it's ridiculous to waste money on a couple of hours in a hotel when she has a sofa bed he can use. They sit talking in the car outside M's apartment for a while. Finally B accepts her offer to put him up for the night. He is planning to leave very early the next day to catch the first train to Paris. They have dinner at a vegetarian restaurant run by a couple of Brazilians, which is open till three in the morning. Once again they are the last customers to leave the premises.

Over dinner M talks about her life. For a moment B is under the impression that she is analyzing her life as a whole. But he is mistaken: M talks about her adolescence, her trips to New York and back, her sleepless nights. She doesn't mention boyfriends, or work, or madness. M drinks wine and B smokes one cigarette after another. Sometimes they look away from each other and watch a car go past outside the window. When they get back to M's place she helps him open out the sofa bed, then goes into her bedroom and shuts the door. Still dressed, B falls asleep reading a novel that seems to be written in a language from another planet. He is woken by M's voice. Like the prostitute the other night, thinks B, the one who talked in her sleep. But before he can muster the willpower to get up, go into M's room, and wake her from her nightmare, he falls asleep again.

The following morning he takes a train to Paris.

He stays at the same hotel in the rue Saint-Jacques, but in a different room, and spends the first few days looking for something by Andre du Bouchet in the secondhand bookshops. He can't find anything. Like Henri of Masnuy, du Bouchet has disappeared from the map. On the fourth day he does not leave the hotel. He orders meals from room service, but hardly touches them. He finishes reading the last novel he bought and tosses it into the wastepaper basket. He sleeps and has nightmares, but when he wakes up he is sure he has not spoken in his sleep. The next day, after a long shower, he goes for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. Then he catches the metro and gets off at Pigalle. He eats at a restaurant on the rue La Bruyйre and sleeps with a prostitute in a little hotel on the rue Navarin. Her hair is shaved at the back but very long on top of her head. She tells him she lives on the fourth floor. There is no elevator. And it is clear that nobody lives there. It is just a room she uses for work, she and her friends.

While they make love the prostitute tells him jokes. B laughs. In his pidgin French he tries to tell her a joke too, but she doesn't understand. When they are finished, the prostitute goes to the bathroom and asks B if he wants a shower. B says no, he had a shower that morning, but all the same he goes into the bathroom to smoke a cigarette and watch her shower.

He is not surprised (or at least he doesn't let it show) when she takes off her wig and leaves it on the toilet lid. Her head is clean-shaven and he can see two relatively recent scars on her scalp. He lights a cigarette and asks how she got them. But the prostitute is already in the shower and doesn't hear him. B doesn't repeat his question. Nor does he leave the bathroom. On the contrary, he makes himself at home; he lies down on the white tiles, feeling placid and relaxed, contemplating the steam billowing out from behind the shower curtain until he can no longer see the wig, or the toilet, or the cigarette in his hand.

By the time they leave, night has fallen, and after saying good-bye he walks unhurriedly but almost without stopping from the Montmartre cemetery to the Pont Royal, by a vaguely familiar route, via the Gare Saint-Lazare. When he gets back to his hotel he looks at himself in a mirror. He is expecting a hangdog look, but what he sees is a thinnish, middle-aged man, sweating slightly from the walk, who seeks, finds, and flees his own gaze, all in a fraction of a second. The next morning he calls M in Brussels. He is not expecting her to be there. He is not expecting anyone to be there. But someone picks up the phone. It's me, says B. How are you? asks M. Well, says B. Have you found Henri Le-febvre? asks M. She must be still half asleep, thinks B. Then he says no. M laughs. She has a pretty laugh. Why are you so interested in him? she asks, still laughing. Because nobody else is, says B. And because he was good. Straightaway he thinks: I shouldn't have said that. And he thinks: M is going to hang up. He clenches his teeth and an involuntary grimace tenses his face. But M doesn't hang up.