"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Just a few cable-lengths from my room, I was sometimes startled, my morning walk only just begun, by dissonant clashes of copper emerging from the demolition of a charming little brick house. Based on the chosen themes of that mysterious orphéon of ruins, I’d imagine behind that sad plaster façade a full procession of ingenuous morning arbors, where electricians in red overalls, blond streetwalkers at dawn, professional corteges in costume facing the rising sun dispersed nocturnal mists in a few of those finely wrought pewter tankards that look so lovely in the foreground of a comic-opera bacchanalia. Could anything more charming be imagined, before the morning rush to work in a uniform’s froggings and pleasing galaxies, than the choir fresh with dew, fanned by extinguished girandoles, and raised toward the sun by those ingenuous stagehands condemned, for the entire day, to hide like delinquents in the dustiest wings of a modern city? A hasty ball, the flight of a lace petticoat in twilight’s darkness was the limit of what I could imagine of the scandals behind that tiny enclosure hidden from land surveyors by the ordinary spring of a plaster curtain wall sure to be demolished in three strikes. But already a lovely tavern with uneven crossbeams was letting its shutters sing in dawn’s light, like the elytra of happy garden bugs unfolding in the morning. Already the street was warmly beckoning me, the misaligned cobbles taking their places in their cells—nothing, isn’t it so, had happened—and like a domino mask on a coquettish woman’s most seductive face, after their morning entrechat the streetlamps and rickety trash cans had resumed their collective watch under the military eye of the city’s sweepers.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang
On the Banks of Fine Bendemeer
I had wandered a long while, in the fading hours of the afternoon, through the cool streets in the neighborhood of cemeteries and riots near the mixed-style cathedral. A pronounced nonchalance, like that of ringed fingers drumming discreetly on a jewelry box in the penumbra of antiquarians’ elegant Merovingian salons, made my step heavy with each turn in the blind spiral of buildings. The transparent prison of air spread the sound of gongs. The only respite given me now and then came from worm-eaten benches that evoked the funereal stations of the cross blazoned with Roman emblems and phalerae, as complex as the metro’s canvas. This labyrinth seemed to serve as pedestal for some shadowy Calvary, some outlying Babel. Doors swung mysteriously here and there, though always beyond a bend in the road, and the dismal pursuit of that sordid opening to the outskirts excited an itching desire within me. Those calls deep as horns, that anxious pursuit through heaps of rubble, ladder scaffoldings, rows of blind shops barren as the Hoggar Mountains, suddenly brought me, behind the screens of a fine rain, before the apse of the most ambiguous building I’ve ever seen—then slid me the password that neutralized the sentry at the postern, and under the wide beams of light, smooth and sea-green from the stained glass windows, with tears in my eyes, I felt the lower half of my body melt in the vigorous, tufted grass of an oceanic meadow.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang
Ross Ice Shelf
One must rise early to see the day ascend over the ice floe’s horizon, at the hour when the sun of the southern latitudes spreads paths onto the sea in the distance. Miss Jane carried her parasol, I an elegant double-barreled shotgun. At every glacier gorge, we’d kiss in the mint crevasses and take pleasure in lingering to see the fiery sun carve a path through a lacework of glittering ice. We liked to walk along the shore where, the cliff breathing steadily with the tide, the sea’s soft, thick rolling predisposed us to love. The waves beat against the walls of blue and green snow, and threw giant crystal flowers at our feet in the coves, but the day’s approach was especially perceptible on that faint hem of phosphorus that lined the scallops of the waves’ crests, as when capital cities set sail at night on the stillness of high seas. At the Cape of Devastation, in the fissures of ice, grew edelweiss the color of midnight blue, and we were always sure to see, day after day, a fresh supply of those seabird eggs that Jane believed could brighten one’s complexion. It was a daily rite for me to repeat Jane’s words on her mouth, as if to gather them with my lips. Sometimes the clouds concealing the cliff’s foot announced an overcast sky for the afternoon, and Jane asked in a small voice whether I’d taken care to wrap the Cheshire cheese sandwiches. Eventually the cliff grew higher and chalky from the sun: that was Desolation Peak, and on Jane’s signal I spread the blanket over the fresh snow. We lay there a long while, listening to the sea’s wild horses beating their chests in the icy caves. The horizon of the open sea was a diamond blue semicircle submerging a wall of ice, where sometimes a flake of vapor emerged, protruding from the sea like a white sail—and Jane recited Lermontov to me. I could have spent entire afternoons there, my hand in hers, following the cawing of seabirds, and tossing chunks of ice into the chasm and listening to them fall, while Jane counted the seconds, sticking out her tongue in concentration like a schoolgirl. Then we embraced each other for so long and so tightly that a single channel narrower than a baby’s cradle formed in the melted snow, and when we got back up, the blanket among the white knolls brought to mind those Asian mules that descend from mountains laden with snow.
Then the sea’s blue deepened and the cliff turned purple; it was the hour when the evening’s sudden cold detaches from the ice floe those crystal castles that crumble into a dust of ice with the sound of a bursting world, turning over, under a blue wave’s gigantic scroll, the belly of a liner with dark algae in its cracks, or the heavy snorting of swimming plesiosaurs. For us alone there grew brighter and brighter, up to the edge of the horizon, that apocalyptic cannonade like a Waterloo of solitudes—and, for a long time, the freezing night, in the great silence, was punctured by distant ghosts gushing forth from tall, white-feather geysers—but I had already squeezed Jane’s icy hand in mine, and we were coming back to the light of pure Antarctic stars.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang