On one occasion he went to the cinema and found that he was the only person there. He was the audience. It was a Kieslowski movie, A Short Film About Love; to Luke it seemed An Interminable Film About Fuck-All and after forty minutes he left. Out in the street he wondered if the screening had been abandoned after his departure; or had the film continued even though no one was there to see it? He walked home, stopping, as he often did, in the Tuileries, which was only a few minutes from his faucet-dripping apartment. In his first month in the city he passed through there almost every afternoon. It was filled with sculptures from a time when, relatively speaking, it was easy to manufacture statues of exceptional power. One was of a naked man, walking, one hand clutching his face in despair. Another was of a man staring at the sun, his hands chained behind his back. Luke’s favourite, though, was of a centaur bearing off a woman. He did not know which biblical or mythical characters were depicted but the statues’ power was scarcely diminished by his ignorance. The theme in these sculptures was always the same: rapture, punishment, suffering. Passion.
He walked by the centaur, looked at the veins pulsing in his belly. The fingers of one hand dug into the woman’s waist, the other tugged her stone hair. His front hoofs had been broken off and she had lost a hand; her other hand grasped his arm but it was impossible to tell if this was a gesture of resistance or abandonment, if he was rescuing or abducting her, if what was being demonstrated was violation or rapture. If it was a violation then it was a rapturous one. Her missing hand — the way her fingers grasped the sky — would have provided a clue but, as things stood, only a pun remained: she was being carried away. Luke stared at the statue, the centaur rearing up on legs that bore the entire weight of stone, head tilted up to the sun, framed by blue.
Most of the other statues were also damaged in some way. Many lacked arms or legs, an unfortunate few were headless, all were being rotted by pollution. Rain soaked their naked skin, the sun scorched their backs. Pigeon shit fell on them. In the extremes of passion depicted, however, such indignities barely registered — so there was an implicit consolation in their fate. Essentially, they endured. The figure clutching his head in despair — had he been blinded? — was walking, putting one foot in front of the other. In spite of the immensity of his affliction, he kept going. Mere survival turned punishment into triumph. Condemned by the gods the statues became gods themselves. They protested their sentence even while accepting it. Always, in some way they were resisting or trying to rise above the fate to which they were condemned. The character in chains struggled against gravity, towards the tormenting sky. And yet, at the same time, the fact that they were made of stone, would never free themselves, meant that at some level they were resigned. Yearning and endurance were indistinguishable. They accepted their sentence even while protesting it. They accepted the sun that dazzled them, accepted the darkness to which blindness had condemned them.
‘O light! This is the cry of all the characters who, in classical tragedy, come face to face with their fate.’
After a week of rain the sky became solid blue. The heat was tremendous and though Luke was consoled by the statues the park itself was a source of torment. Arranged at discreet intervals, young men and women sunbathed, read, dozed. Many of the women wore swimming costumes. The park was like a beach and, as on a beach, Luke was aghast at how beautiful they were, these women. Several came for their lunch hour, stripped down to their swimming costumes, ate their sandwiches, dressed and left. Back at their desks they may have been plain, ordinary, but for that interlude of near-nakedness they were beautiful. Luke walked around the park and then, like a respectful pervert, chose a spot where he could watch a particular woman, could watch her arms, her legs, her breasts, her hair, hoping that she would catch his eye, return his gaze. The park seethed with a potent mix of sex and celibacy. No one could read for more than two pages without looking round at the other readers. Everyone was reading as displacement activity or disguise but this disguise was so effective that to violate it was inconceivable.
What hell it was, this park! It was so different from the parts of the Seine frequented by cruising gays. Walking along the river on his way to the park Luke always felt uncomfortable, obscurely offended by their stares, by the flagrant desire conveyed by their looks. They made him feel prudish, affronted. Then, when he reached the park and began looking at women with exactly the attention that, a few minutes earlier, had been focused on him, that gay world seemed nothing short of idyllic. He envied the men their common currency of glances and desire. How perfect it would have been to have caught the eye of a woman who was hoping to catch his eye, to have exchanged a few words, to have walked back to his dismal room and ripped each other’s clothes off. His thoughts were as crude as a prisoner’s but as strong as these desires — far stronger in fact — was his acceptance of the idea that it was not on to disturb a woman when she was pretending to read, that she had a perfect right to sit on her own in a park reading a sexually explicit book and not be pestered by men. A couple of times he had seen men make approaches but the women on whom they had imposed themselves had never seemed flattered or pleased by these attentions. Or almost never. On one occasion he had watched a tanned American sit next to a woman with short blonde hair and a lovely shy laugh. Luke heard that laugh a lot in the next half hour and then he saw them gather up their things and leave together.
It never happened like that for Luke. Even on days when the park was ablaze with women he left as he’d arrived, on his own. On the way out of the gates he always passed an old woman who sat patiently in a chair, holding a card on which was written ‘DITES MOI’ in thick black ink. She seemed happy enough, sitting there, announcing her wish to talk without any hint of pleading or supplication. So matter-of-fact was the announcement that it seemed as if she were not requesting conversation but providing a service: ‘If you need to speak to someone, here I am.’ Perhaps that was why no one ever took her up on her offer. Luke had never seen anyone speak to her: people were embarrassed by her loneliness because it so frankly mirrored their own. And the sign itself was strangely off-putting. Having externalised her desire for speech in this way she was left in the most complete silence imaginable. The card rendered her mute, dumb; all the language of which she was capable had been set down, framed and preserved in those two words: dites moi. Luke was fascinated by her, by the way that she had decided what she wanted, did what she could to obtain it, and then sat and waited, apparently without desire or hope. He wanted to know her story but, oddly, he never considered asking her, speaking to her. Instead he walked back to his stained apartment, lay down on the unerotic bed and masturbated — an act that left him feeling sadder than ever. If an orgasm was a petite mort then this was petite suicide.
Instead of spending his afternoons prowling the parks and jerking off like this he should have been working on his French which was so poor that even the simplest tasks — deciphering menus, buying bleach to clean out the toilet, ordering sandwiches — became major exercises in pantomime diplomacy. Rarely understanding how much shopkeepers and waiters were charging him, he paid for everything with fifty- or hundred-franc notes and came home with sagging pockets of change. The most efficient way to have used this money would have been to enrol in one of the many courses in French conversation and grammar but Luke persuaded himself he could absorb the language passively, by osmosis, without effort, by reading the French subtitles of American films.