I am especially moved by the way old Countess de Vercellis died. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who witnessed it, describes the episode in his Confessions: “With her serene mind and pleasant mood, she made the Catholic religion attractive to me. In the very end, she stopped chatting with us; but as she entered the final struggles of agony, she let off a big fart. ‘Well,’ she said, turning over in her bed, ‘a woman that farts is not dead.’ These were her last words.”
The most heartbreaking last words are those of Pancho Villa. As the Mexican revolutionary was about to be shot, he found himself suddenly lost for words. He begged some journalists who stood nearby: “Don’t let it end like this! Tell them I said something.” Yet this time the journalists, instead of making something up, as is their usual practice, soberly reported the failure of inspiration in all its naked truth. Trust journalists!
DETOURS
A direct path merely takes you to your destination.
SIDEWAYS
ALAN BENNETT describes in one of his journals how, during a visit to Egypt, he found himself trapped among cohorts of tourists trudging wearily through dusty wastes of sand and rocks under a merciless sun: the famous site he had come to admire looked merely like a stone quarry full of sweaty crowds. He wondered if tourism was not like pornography: a desperate search for lost sensation. The fact is, the only impressions that truly register on our sensibilities are accidental — we did not seek them out (let alone book an organised tour!).
As E.M. Forster observed, “Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.” There are also Egypts of the mind; in the end, it is perhaps chance encounters with books and random jottings, however shallow, that can best escape dreariness.
CREATIVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS
In the arts, there are works that benefit from being misunderstood. Many years ago, a journalist who was interviewing Julien Green discovered to his surprise that this austere writer was a great fan of the James Bond movies. But according to a friend who often accompanied the old man to the cinema, it appeared that he was always getting the plot-lines hopelessly mixed up.
This of course explains everything: the silliest scenario must acquire a disturbing depth after it has percolated through the filters and alembics of the author of a novel such as Moira.
On the subject of these creative misunderstandings, I still recall some African audiences with imaginations that bordered on sheer genius. In my youth, I once had the chance to make a fairly long journey on foot through the country of the Bayakas in a poor and remote corner of the Kwango region in the Congo. There, in the villages of the bush, an enterprising Greek merchant, who had a four-wheel-drive jeep and an electric generator, would come from time to time and organise a film session. (I am of course referring to the time before independence; for today, even if there should still be any enterprising Greek merchants around, I doubt very much that they would find passable tracks to reach these distant hamlets.)
The films that were shown on these rare and festive occasions were old Hollywood productions from the ’30s and ’40s — with femmes fatales holding white telephones and cigar-chomping gangsters in pinstripe suits. Did they come with a soundtrack? I do not remember now, but in any case it would have been of limited use, since the spectators understood only Kiyaka. Nevertheless they managed to invent for themselves, on the sole basis of these bleary black-and-white images flickering on a makeshift screen under the stars, in the warm night full of screeching insects, prodigious stories that no screenwriter could have conceived, even had he let his imagination run wild.
In these ancient American productions, black actors were rare and they were invariably confined to minor parts: doormen, shoe-shiners, cooks, railway porters. Yet it was on them that the passionate interest of the public entirely focused. To their eyes, these fleeting walk-ons were the true protagonists of the film. The very scarcity of their visible interventions would only confirm the occult and central importance of the roles that the collective inspiration of the audience was bestowing on them. Whenever they unexpectedly reappeared on screen for a few seconds, a roar of enthusiasm greeted their return, which had been awaited with intense expectation. Sometimes the black supernumerary would make only one appearance, and never come back. But it did not matter: he became all the more free to pursue his adventures in that other film, invisible and fabulous, of which the screen could only show the feeble negative image.
HAWAII STOPOVER
The most depressing thing is to watch these crowds of tourists, who paid a not inconsiderable amount to come here and secure for themselves eight days of happiness. In the motley uniforms of holiday convicts, they patrol lugubriously this huge Luna Park while trying hard to persuade themselves that they are getting their money’s worth of fun.
Léon Bloy commented on the famous passage of St. Paul—“In this life we perceive things obscurely, as if in a mirror”—wondering whether the main point of the apostle’s observation was that our world presented an inverted image of the other world. This would suggest, for instance, that the pleasures of the living are merely a reflection of the torments of the damned.
And when you come to think of it, it is easy to see how the delights of Hawaii, a cruise ship or a holiday resort could provide a fairly convincing image of hell.
COINCIDENCE
I was working on my translation of The Analects of Confucius and I had just reached the passage (12.18) “Lord Ji Kang was troubled by burglars. He consulted with Confucius. Confucius replied, ‘If you yourself were not covetous, they would not rob you even if you paid them to.’” On that same day, my little boat was broken into, and I lost a few small things to which I had the weakness to be attached.
I should have drawn some comfort from this coincidence. Indeed, I cannot help but feel that, at times, the supreme teacher is merely addressing one side of my psychology, which resembles to a deplorable extent that of Ah Q, the famous satirical character (created by Lu Xun) who invented a way to transform all the defeats of his wretched existence into as many “moral victories.”
Nevertheless, it remains true that one should own only those things one can possess casually.
SHADES OF SALAZAR
I just found in an old notebook a press clipping that I must have cut from a news magazine about thirty-five years ago. At the time I thought it might provide one day an interesting argument for a play or philosophical tale. Here it is:
SHADES OF SALAZAR
Though the 36-year rule of Portugal’s Antonio de Oliveira Salazar ended last year, the old man is not yet aware of it. Still immobilised after a stroke and a coma 13 months ago, Salazar calls cabinet meetings, and his old ministers faithfully attend — even though some of them are no longer in the cabinet. No one has found the courage to tell the 80-year-old dictator that he has been replaced.
But I never managed to do anything with it. There are realities upon which no fiction can improve.