How could I imagine this hideous, crumbling jungle creature to be Nadja? Some feeling made me follow until, crossing a busy street, I lost sight of her. I panicked and looked around wildly. She was gone and I was forced to suppress a great scream of pain. Unused to this severe sort of anxiety, I battled to control my emotions, there in the midst of a crowd of Indians.
It was what Nadja had meant when she stuck her tongue into my ear as we rode in a cab along the boulevard Raspail. As quickly as she’d done it she withdrew to the opposite corner of the seat and said, staring blankly ahead, ‘To me nothing is more terrifying than the curse of self-fulfilment.’
What did Nadja do before we met? I asked her many times and mostly she would avoid answering by laughing and kissing me, adjusting my tie, or brushing my lapels. She did tell me she was born in Belgium, near Ghent, and that her father raised flowers. She went to the local school, a convent, and moved to Paris when she was seventeen. She met a man, unidentified, got married, gave birth to a daughter, who promptly died of pneumonia. Those were facts, according to Nadja. The man was gone soon after the daughter.
Other than that there was little Nadja would admit. None of it was important, she said. ‘Not to you!’ She instructed me to invent her story, it was all the same, unrelated to today. ‘Who is the hero of a film that has at its centre a peacock flying through and landing in the snow?’ Nadja asks, licking my chin as if she were here.
I must recall how and why I became involved with Nadja. I was walking along the rue Vaugirard, preparing to turn into the Luxembourg, when I saw a woman standing in front of a butcher’s shop, desperately examining the contents of her purse. I say desperately because there were lines of great consternation on her face, as if she had misplaced and was frantically searching for the ticket that would allow her to claim a side of beef she’d pawned or left to be laundered. The weather was foul, it was early November and it was raining. The air was ugly, full of wood smoke and water, black, brown and grey. The woman, who was Nadja, was a disconcerting sight, her hair matted, stockings torn, coat soaked. I approached her immediately and asked if I might be of service.
’This is an evil afternoon,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘Can you buy me a drink? There are ravens everywhere now. Even in the shops, in the road. The government is full of them, as you no doubt are already aware. What would a government be without its ravens?’ She stared at me with horrible yellow eyes. There was no possibility of refusal. ’Of course,’ I said, and Nadja smiled, a sweet genuine smile, and gently took my arm.
Nadja had a harelip. Have I mentioned that? Or had been born with a harelip. She’d had it fixed, but that was the reason for her lopsided grin that added so inexplicably to Nadja’s desirability.
She disliked being thought of as foolish, though she often sought to contribute to the common good by committing foolish acts, such as disrobing in the Louvre in front of the Mona Lisa. For that ’act of valour’, as Nadja referred to it, she spent several days in jail, not having the money to pay the fine for being a public nuisance.
Following the incident at the Louvre, Nadja made a similar gesture of liberation on the avenue d’lena near the German Club. The Germans, she claimed, would not have her arrested; instead, Nadja said, they would pretend to ignore her. Then came the affair at the Trocadéro where Nadja disrobed and poured a bucket of red paint over her head. Neither time was she detained. The Mona Lisa episode had made her famous for the moment and her exploits of this order were no longer effective. Trocadéro was Nadja’s final mention in the newspapers. After that hers was a presence of secrets.
Nadja had a habit of laughing at the wrong moment. Someone would be in the midst of telling a story, approaching a crucial point, and Nadja would begin to laugh, softly at first, then gradually increase the level of laughter to a kind of shrill cry, shocking all those present and of course preventing the narrator from finishing his tale. The phenomenon would not occur always, but often enough so that I would be on edge whenever we were in the company of others. Several times I was forced to escort Nadja out of the room until she regained her self-control.
The unpredictable laughter was not her only social aberration. Nadja refused to be photographed. True, photographs of Nadja do exist, but they were taken surreptitiously, without her knowledge; usually when she was drunk.
Contrary to what most of my acquaintances thought at the time, Nadja was the least mysterious person I have ever met. Everything about her was obvious. Her motives were plain, she desired love, sanity, colour – all healthy pursuits. Failure on any one count can hardly be held against Nadja. Disgrace, after all, is merely a manifestation of value. The price of anything is always set in advance. Nadja made me see this. Truth is perhaps more horrible than anyone would dare admit.
She was standing there in the dream, the gun still in her hand pointing down at the body, when the cops broke in. It was Nadja with a Barbara Stanwyck hairdo in a black robe, a silk one with gold brocade on the wide lapels. ‘I shot him in the face,’ she said, ‘and he tumbled like laundry down a chute.’ Those were her exact words. They were fresh in my mind when I woke up. The name of the movie was Riffraffs that much I could remember. But it wasn’t real, it was a dream, right? I hadn’t seen Nadja in four years, and I knew who the man on the floor had to be.
One morning Nadja awoke and could not see out of her right eye. She sent a pneu asking me to meet her at the Café des Oiseaux that afternoon. ‘It’s awful and wonderful,’ Nadja said as soon as I sat down at her table. ‘There is a cloud in my eye, floating across the centre.’
‘Is it any particular colour?’ I asked.
‘Red,’ said Nadja. ‘Like a veil of blood.’
‘Perhaps it is blood,’ I said. ‘Have you made arrangements to see a doctor?’
‘Doctors can only destroy,’ Nadja said. ‘Have you a cigarette?’
I gave her one, lit it and watched her blow out the smoke.
‘Usually cigarette smoke is blue,’ she said. ‘Mixed with the red it’s actually quite beautiful, like two ghost ships passing through one another on the rolling sea.’
I asked Nadja what she intended to do about this problem.
‘Nothing.’ she said. ‘So I have one normal eye and one very interesting eye. The left shall be the practical side, the ordinary eye, useful and necessary. The right shall be the dream side, the indefinable, the exquisite and ungraspable. The right eye is my entrance to a drifting, unstable world ruled by colour and magic. Nothing is absolute there, it is a true wilderness. Covered by this thin red veil realities are made bearable by their vagueness.’