One Man`s Bible

61

Perpignan is a city in the French border area adjoining Spain. A friend you have just met at the Mediterranean Literary Center asks if you get homesick, and you reply categorically that you do not. You say that you had cut off those feelings long ago, completely! In the square opposite the restaurant, a little cake-and-ice-cream shop celebrating its first day of business is decked out with lanterns and colored streamers to attract customers. A small brass band is playing with great gusto, it is jolly music, and an old woman is doing a local Catalan folk dance. The Southerners' passion and the heavy roll in their French make you feel close to them.

This early summer night brings a festive atmosphere, and, with the cheerful brass pipes as well, is it also celebrating your new life?

You have finally won joy in living. The proprietor of the restaurant comes to you with a book for your signature. He says his wife loved your novel and now wants to go on a trip to China. You smile.

You will not go back. Not even in future? someone asks. No, it is not your country. It exists in your memory only, as a hidden spring gushing forth feelings that are hard to articulate. This China is possessed by you alone, and has nothing to do with the country.

Your heart is at peace, and you are no longer a rebel. You are now an observer, and not anyone's enemy. If anyone wants to make an enemy of you, it no longer concerns you. For you, looking back has been a time of quiet reflection, so that you can get on with your life.

When you left China, you had brought with you a photograph that had been lost between the pages of a book. He was thin and had his head shaved. You look closely at the old yellowing photograph that you had somehow managed to keep. It had been taken thirty years ago in that reform-through-labor farm known as a May Seventh Cadre School. You want to see if his eyes will tell you anything. His shaved head, looking like a gourd ladle, was held high. He was proud, somewhat arrogant, even as a convict, and this had probably saved him from being crushed. But there is now no need for any arrogance. You are now a bird that is free and can fly wherever you want. There seems to be virgin land up ahead, well, at least, for you it is new. Luckily, you still have this sort of curiosity and don't want to be immersed in memories. He has already become footprints, which you have left behind.

Using this instant of time as the starting point, for you, writing is a spiritual journey, either in deep reflection, or talking to yourself, and you obtain joy and fulfillment in the process. Nothing frightens you anymore, for freedom eradicates fear. Let the sterile writings you leave behind erode with the passage of time. For you, eternity is not of pressing significance. This bout of writing is not your goal in life, but you continue to write so that you will be able to experience more fully this instant of time.

This instant of time is in Perpignan, after breakfast. As cars drive by under your window, illuminated shadows glide past the milk-white globular streetlights, but before there is time to see what sort of car it is, the illuminated shadow has vanished. Many shadows are illuminated in the world, but they will all vanish. You savor the shadows illuminated in this instant, so you also savored this he as a shadow that had been illuminated, and it amazed you. Oh, his shadow that was illuminated has flashed by and vanished!

It is beautiful music, Schnittke. Right now you are listening to Concerto Grosso No. 6. In this elegant piece, the frustrations of life are gracefully sublimated into high notes, which are released by the long chords of the violin streaking by like lightning. There is no need to try to understand the life of your contemporary Schnittke, but, from a conversation you had with him, each note he wrote echoed in harmony with the high notes of the violin.

Outside your window is the bright sunshine of early summer.

Eight hundred years ago, Perpignan, this city in the East Pyrenees, was a city-nation with a constitution that enshrined magnanimity, peace, and freedom. It was a city that received refugees, and the local Catalans took pride in this. However, the editorials of special editions commemorating the eight-hundredth anniversary of the city write about "eight hundred years of democracy and freedom, today under threat."

You didn't imagine you would ever come here, and, even less so, that readers would ask for your autograph. A youth asked you to write something in your book for his girlfriend, who, he said, couldn't come. You go to write, "Language is a miracle that allows people to communicate, but people often fail to communicate with one another." However, you only write the first half of it. You can't just write anything you feel like at the expense of another's good intentions. You are free to make fun of yourself, but you must not make fun of language.

Music must also be like this, and it is best to remove unnecessary ornamentation. Schnittke had a compulsive need to do this, he did not flaunt music, he was minimalist and left many spaces, every phrase conveyed genuine feeling, there was nothing contrived or gratuitous. You must only speak when you have something to say, if you do not, then best be silent.

The illuminated shadows of one car after another flash by the globular streetlights, and on the other side of the street, plane trees and palms grow in a quiet little park. This region is the home of the French plane tree, a species that roots from cuttings, and has virtually spread throughout the world. It also entered your memories and grew everywhere along the streets and in the parks in the city where you lived as a child. The first girl you kissed, Little Five, was leaning against the shiny trunk of a plane tree that had shed its bark. It was also summer, but hotter than here.

It is good to be alive, and you sing a hymn to life, sing it because life has not treated you badly in everything. But sometimes life still makes your heart tremble, like this music with its crisp, fine drum-beats and the sound of the horns.

Not long before Sylvie's friend Martina killed herself, she picked up a drifter from the streets and took him home for the night.

Finally, she killed herself. She said on the tape she had left behind that she could not bear the psychiatric hospital, and that her death had nothing to do with anyone. She was sick of life, killed herself, and that was the end. You do not know what your end will be like, and there is no need to plan an end. Should neofascists one day come to power, if it is still a magnanimous city that accepts refugees, will you escape here, to Perpignan? You are not going to fantasize about disaster.

To say that people are born to suffer, or that the world is a wasteland, is an exaggeration. Disasters have not been entirely your lot, so you are grateful to life, and this gratitude is akin to thanking God, but who is your God? Fate? Coincidence? You think that it is this consciousness of your self, this awareness of your own existence, that is to be thanked, for it was through this that you were able to save yourself from your predicament and suffering.

The big leaves of the palms and the plane trees are trembling. A person cannot be crushed if he refuses to be crushed. Others may oppress him, and defile him but, as long as he has not stopped breathing, he will still have the chance to raise his head. It is a matter of being able to preserve this last breath, to hold onto this last breath, so that one does not suffocate in the pile of shit. A person can be raped, woman or man, physically or by political force, but a person cannot be totally possessed: one's spirit remains one's own, and it is this that is preserved in the mind. Schnittke was uncertain with his music, and he was groping in the dark; seeking a way out was like searching for light, but he relied solely on that small point of dim light in his heart, and it was this feeling that was indestructible.

Pressing his palms together to protect that point of dim light in his heart, he slowly moved through thick darkness, quagmire, not knowing where the path lay, yet carefully protecting that point of dim light. He was patient rather than obstinate. His tough resilience wove a cocoon; like a larva, he played dead and closed his eyes to endure the weight of the loneliness. But those delicate tinkling bells, that point of awareness of existence, that point of beauty of life, that gentle light, that spot of pulsating in the heart gradually began to radiate outward…

On the bare branches of the tallow tree in front of the door, a few frost-lashed, withered, dark-red leaves trembled. He felt compassion for the youthful glow of that helpless young woman, the gurgling of the stream, the black mother hen on the single log bridge, head down, pecking, then looking up to stare. They were all projections of his self. Even the lust aroused in him by that sexy girl flirting with him and mocking him had made him keep his grip on life, made him hold his breath to wait. While he could not find a way out, by seizing these beautiful specks of feeling, he was able to avoid spiritual collapse. Also, he comforted himself by masturbating, and obtained slow release by secretly writing.

There was the clean fragrance of the paddy-rice straw cushioning his plank bed in those years, and the smell of his sheets drying in the sun after they had been washed in the pond. And there was also the sweaty smell of her body, his tender excitement as he corrected her lipstick, and the tremor in his heart as, brushing her firm breasts, he seized her by her strong shoulders and pushed her out the door.

She had provided him with warmth and, in his imagination, he had been intimate with her. Moreover, he had articulated all these in language, put them into his writings, in order to obtain spiritual equilibrium.

You are filled with gratitude to women, and it is not just lust. You seek them, but they do not necessarily want to give themselves to you. You are insatiable, but it's impossible for you to have them all.

God did not give them to you, and you don't have to thank God, but, finally, you do feel a sort of universal gratitude. You are grateful to the wind and the trees swaying in the wind, grateful to nature, grateful to the parents who gave birth to you. You now have no hatred and are at peace. Maybe it is because you are getting old that you lose your breath when climbing a hill, and you are now frugal with what used to be inexhaustible energy. These are signs of getting old. You are going downhill, and a chilly wind suddenly starts blowing. No, you are not in a hurry to go down. The distant mountains in the mist seem to be at the same altitude, and you go down even if there is an abyss at the bottom, so, when you fall, you might as well think of the splash of the setting sun on the faraway mountain tops.

In the small harbor, on a jutting cliff, is a small church. Facing the Mediterranean Sea, stands a white cross with a black metal statue of Jesus Christ nailed to it. The wind is still and the waves are calm, there are people on the sandy beach, and children are running about. There is also a woman in a bathing suit, her eyes closed, lying in a nook in the cliff.

They say that Matisse once lived and painted here, where the sunlight is transparent and blinding. Light and color are in the paintings of Matisse, but you are walking toward darkness.

They drive you to Barcelona, the city with the bright-red Dali Museum decked with giant eggs on the roof. Spain had produced this old naughty child and the Spanish are a happy race. Crowds throng the streets. The black-haired Spanish women all have dark eyes and high nose bridges. Afterward, you go to a village restaurant that used to be a mill. Diagonally opposite is a family seated around a table: husband, wife, and their very pretty daughter whose rosy cheeks glow through her fair skin. The girl's long, black eyelashes are not fully-grown, but one day she will become one of the sturdy, voluptuous, big girls of Picasso's paintings. She is sitting across from her parents, sulking, engrossed in her own thoughts. Maybe she doesn't really know what she is thinking. That is life, she doesn't know what is in her future, and surely that is important? She doesn't know that she too will suffer, maybe she will get wiser, as she starts to worry. Her thick long black hair enhances her fair complexion and rosy cheeks. She is probably just thirteen or fourteen. For a young girl, thirteen or fourteen years of age, already to be sulking, surely, is one of the wonders of life, just like the suffering of Margarethe. Will she become a Margarethe?

Right now you are listening to a mass by Kodaly, a woman singing to an organ. People need prayer just like they need to eat and make love, and you, too, have religious feelings. Last night, the woman in the room above was crying out all the time. It was excruciating, and stopped you from sleeping the whole night. From midnight till three o'clock, she was screaming, panting, then laughing loudly. You couldn't tell if it was rape or ecstasy taking place. At first, you thought it was in the room next to your bed headboard, then you heard the noise on the floorboards above, and it seemed that they were playing sex games on the floor, maybe it was the sort of rape Margarethe had spoken about. But so what if this were the case, it was happening in the hotel room, and no one would ask questions. Afterward, you heard laughter, loud wanton laughter that even aroused your lust.

However, your heart is now at peace, and there is die organ and the wonderful choir of alto and tenor singers.

Earlier, at breakfast in the dining room downstairs, you only heard polite good mornings in German. It was a German tourist group of hefty, middle-aged and elderly couples at buffet breakfast, so everyone had a plate full of diced sausage and fried bacon. They eat a lot but aren't worried about putting on weight. The thought crossed your mind that it was unlikely that these women would have been crying out in bed. They were all engrossed in eating and seldom spoke, and their knives and forks made very little noise. At a table by the window was a young woman, sitting opposite an elderly man. They had finished eating and were drinking their coffee. They were not talking, but looking out at the street. The fine weather of yesterday had changed, the ground was wet, but the rain had stopped. They did not appear to be lovers, but were more like a father on vacation with a daughter who was still not financially independent. Probably the woman who was wailing and laughing loudly last night was still fast asleep in her room.

The organ and a choir. The hotel room has stylish old furniture, a heavy oak table, dark-brown carved wardrobes, and a wooden bed with round carved posts. Outside the window, no cars are flashing past the round streetlights. It is Sunday, late morning, and you are waiting for friends to take you to the airport to catch the plane back to Paris some time after noon.

1996 to 1998, in Paris