Leaning

Leaning on my window, I watch the news, the feelings, the pants, the heads of soldiers and the hearts of spring pass by, heavy eyelids and oranges waxed like cannonballs, all in the sweetish halo of Mr. Bedloë’s memories. The panorama unfurls, like a sheet of decalcomania between the fingers of a child. Shadows of students, workers, and hunted lovers tangle in a gun-club bouquet. And from the top of my balustrade, I see the vans of the market gardeners, the buses, cars, and taxis that compete and consider each other ready to have it out for the great cataclysm of the streets, while the demons of the sewers rise, adorning the bitumen and fabric landscape with movements of pride and the humor of the Naja tripudians.

Anxious and pallid passersby look for doors, like the five daughters of Orlamonde. Long lines of faces and backs come and go on the belly of this nursery. The trees of the 6th arrondissement and the sidewalk loves, wheels with worn lips, hollow-toothed shoes, and some alopeciac intellectuals accompany the procession up to the point of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to descend anew toward the rails of Gare de Lyon. My eye plunges into the fate of these wide-awake night owls.

Leaning on my window, I suddenly feel myself drawn to these abandoned skulls, these poor skulls of the École Maternelle. And I would cry long hours of tears over these silhouettes that take my place in the crowd — yes, I would cry with impatience and fervor, I would cry out of loneliness, if I did not know that I too, just now, I will let myself slide on the discolored and bruised stone, my soul deep in my pockets, my pockets gaping, my life as heavy as a wet newspaper and my eyes tired from nights of memories.

Already, the restaurant is carrying out its loving work, the manager of the Hunting Horn brushes his frock coats as delicate as the lives of insects, the dairyman decants his ripolins, the pipe dealer cleans his cerebellum with a brush glistening with nicotine. Great noises of meditation mixed with enthusiasm, rapacious anger, violence against others, combinations of hearts, the hum of ambition, all flourish in an invisible earth and rise in fresh sheaves to the point of my despair. I am the man of the steamer who is driven by dark desire to throw himself into that water of men and of females, to drown there my hatred of constraints and my weariness of listening at the gates of life.

Leaning on my window, I see the taxi and its shadow the fiacre, the passerby and his neighbor the corpse, the eyes that lie, the employees who believe themselves to be popular men, the women who engird the bored rich and the love that rots at the edge of their mouths. My gaze descends to the humus of this tingling. I am moved by so many destinies that trot like sarigues between two boulevards, between two meals, between two worlds, Raspail and Saint-Michel, the bit on my feet and the ruse on my nails. Formerly, a long, fat, secret thing where the pillagers and the carriages sneaked in, where they suddenly perceived, like a star, the furtive foot of a princess, the eye of a hardened soldier, or the rosacea of a devotee, the streets consoled, no doubt by their mystery alone, the wreckage of the passerby, or frightened or killed him. There is, in the past of sidewalks and doors, a whole side of Alexandre Dumas whose meticulous fantasy has always got me by the guts. Today, it is only the military movements of the Parisians, uniform and intertwined like clover sprigs. The same overcoat covers a thousand shoulders; the same omnibus serves as an armchair to a thousand larvae and carries a greenish snout swollen with the hurly-burly exiting from a factory. At daybreak, the 15 tons of vendables, regular as rapids, enter the station, brakes straining and tires raging. The ears of the chimneys of Rue du Four curl up like acacia leaves, the eyelids of the bakeries jump, the robust and sad drunks pirouette on the heel of a skater and cling to trash cans.

But, from my window, when this artillery burst the city like a bladder, I can still see shadows twirling. Diaphanous and slender, the ankles of sirens circle round street lamps. The moon of Paris penetrates the benches, the drapes, the iron curtains, the mops, the earthenware, the soap, the wallet folded like a sex organ, the sex organ that has the value of a wallet, and this heavy, mauve liquid that flows in the eye as we close it under the pressure of sleep.

Oftentimes, I am exhausted from attentiveness and patience. There seems to be a burden on my shoulders that will keep me from getting up. My arms will enter for eternity into the wrought iron of the abutment, and I will always watch, like a tree, entirely alone, like a lighthouse, the ant-like movements of the men whom I touch with a long gaze. Often, interruptions are formed in my bent pose, and I feel behind my back that life is calling me: it is the telephone and its lasso of dialogues, its words flinging themselves at you like parents; it’s the postman and his orchestra of stamps, his card games, his toy carpenter’s kit from Galeries Lafayette. It’s the person one doesn’t expect, and who, we think with cold sweats in the ears, risks blocking the way of the person one does expect…

So, the chore is done. I rush toward my windows again. And, when it is too late, I imagine them, lying down, I fall asleep on the back of a dream, like a despairing Mallarméan. My curtains draw into my congested room all the roofs of the street and its windows and its shops. Life is there, in the dreamy, buzzing smoke. It’s the cracking open of a better world than that which I imagine, with a warm neck and a ruminating heart. I can imagine, behind the cement, the cut stone or the brick, solid frames of egoism and consideration. I can imagine, behind the serge, the comb, or the cheviot, meager resistances to temptation: tobacco, an aperitif, the tramp, the crime-filled suburban train…

Leaning on my window, I feel my life trickling drop by drop into everyone’s cemetery. I see my desires follow a procession of the poor to the mass grave where thistles, stones, and keen-eyed critters await me. I am no longer a man of memory. The mistresses of old no longer inhabit my shriveled heart. They left little more than debris. Neither art nor politics, hunger nor ambition, would make me change my place now. I love this vespasienne draped in its crinoline, this carriage with the beautiful buttocks of male asparagus, this tram that returns from Châtelet, quite surprised to no longer find its tracks. I love that man who walks away, all alone against himself, brushing against the walls; and I love this woman, harried and not very elegant, but cheerful and fragrant like a basket of fruit. I see her, short and violent under her mantilla, slipping like a color on a palette, darting through the crowd, like a quick laugh. She passes by, she does not raise her head: her senses are still not sharp enough to hear my call.

Leaning on my window, I see that the world is nothing but a game of skull bowling. And I soon see nothing but hats, nothing but hats, bowlers, fedoras, caps, all the dark and shaggy hardware of women, and always hats. And under the hats are the hairy scalps, and under those scalps coated with the spirit of contradiction are ideas… Some slip through to me in the signatures of climbing plants; others descend toward the mesentery of the idler, like the roots of a black radish. The emotions are more perceptible and more vivid. Hatred, always the first to bear leaves and fruits, wanders and fumes. Its smell soon leapt to the nostrils of the watchman. Here is the desire, the friendship, the confidence, the sense of happiness, the lust for laziness, the disposition to jealousy. A sort of broth is being made before my eyes, in this crossroads, where everything is simmering together: rowboats and gaiter buttons, the old and the new; the intelligence of Mr. Ipartakofu, an austere and snobbish Jew, and the delicacy of Mrs. Thusdie, born Lamouru; the tact of my friends Craven, gunsmith, Hoof, sheet-metal worker, Imbroglious, genealogist, and the Count des Shutmouth, arbiter of elegance.

Yes, my soul, all that you see, it’s life, all that you examine with a sigh, it’s life. Let’s remain, the two of us, a hundred years and more, let’s stay with our arms on the balustrade, our bodies leaning against the railing, prudence sharpened, let’s remain and resign ourselves. Let us not descend into this threnody; let’s not be confused by the noise of false souls, of hearts eaten by worms, of poisonous spirits. Yes, let’s stay together, you in the middle of me, me around you, you suffering, me struggling. Let us sometimes close our eyes, try to put between the street and ourselves, between ourselves and others, oceans of mute lyricism, ramparts stuffed with hydrophilic cotton. Let us return slowly to the memories of skipping school, both of us whispering with a wolf’s step to images gleaned from long adolescence. My soul, we were rolled into the dust of false oaths, we were promised not only rewards that we did not want, but kindnesses, “myosotis of love.” We were led to believe that we were smiling, that we were loved, that the hands that slipped into our hands were clean and free of thorns. O slip of disappointments and tortures! For us there were never any righteous effusions, or sincere palms. They even wanted to separate us, and to break you deep inside me, my soul, like an elixir in a shell.

I saw the mouths that I loved lying; I saw shut, like drawbridges, the hearts wherein my confidence resided; I have surprised hands in my pockets, gazes in my inner life; I heard whisperings on lips that had only accustomed me to cries of affection. They formed fasces behind my back, they declared war on me, they robbed me of smiles, handshakes, promises. Nothing, nothing was left to us, my soul. We only have the street before our eyes and the cemetery below our feet. We know our desperate hymen is being joked about. We hear that people are coming with scythes of blood and gall to cut the last grass from under our feet in order to better show us the path to the grave.

But we shall be strong, my soul. I will be the bolt and you the nut, and we will be able, for a thousand and a thousand years, to approach the waves; we can lean on that window of distress. And then, in the murmur of our waiting, one pathic evening, some creature will come. We will recognize it by its clandestine purity; we shall guess at its fresh words. It will come to close our eyes, to cross our arms over our chests. It will say that our love, all this love that we have not seen, all this love that we have trampled on, that we have bruised, yes, that our love is no more than our eternity.

So, my soul, while I am lying there and already rustling, you will go and lean on the window, you will put on the beautiful clothes of the sentinel, and you will cry, you will cry with all your might!

We will hear.

Who is this We?

Who? you ask?

But every soul knows.

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High Solitude is now available from Contra Mundum Press.

Léon-Paul Fargue (1876 – 1947) was a poet and essayist whose worked spanned numerous literary movements. As works such as D’après Paris (1932) and Le Piéton de Paris (1939) attest, his writing was often steeped in love for the city of his birth. A renowned nightbird and socialite, he was none-the-less familiar with the solitude of city life.

Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer, translator, and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion. He is the author of The Acolytes, The Abdication, Shattering the Muses, Closing Melodies, and Dionysos Speed, as well as other works. Some of his translations include Charles Baudelaire’s Belgium Stripped Bare and Antonin Artaud’s Journey to Mexico.