“You made it up. That’s not in the book, believe me.”
“Come on, you know very well I’m not joking.” She took up Kostolány’s book again and began to read from the same tale—the tale of how I had spent yesterday.
“Katalin, the tale you’re telling me isn’t in that book.”
“On a certain level, I understand you, François. What I’m saying isn’t in any book. All the same, here, just take a look….”
With her finger, she showed me page seventy-eight, where I read “All these rows of paintings are unbearable for me: bloodless nudes, idiotic portraits, nauseating crucifixions, ponderous battles….” I paled. Katalin leaned over and kissed me.
“So, do you recognize me now?” She drew nearer, placed her mouth to my ear, and murmured: “Katalin, Caterina, Katalin, Caterina…” She laughed at my confusion, then began to speak very rapidly about her work, about her hobbies, about her life. Her family lived in Pécs; she had two brothers and two sisters; she was taking business classes, but she really liked painting and cinema. When speaking of her everyday life, she made use of the words “my daily routine”—mein Alltagsleben in German—which hardly reassured me.
A few minutes later, she took my hand and placed it on her belly. “I’m expecting a baby; you can feel him, can’t you?” I touched her belly. My hand shook. “Yes, yes, I can feel him.” I ran over in my mind the first name of the woman whose belly I was now touching: Catherine, Katharina, Katalin, Caterina. “Come to my house,” she said.
We left the cellar and walked in the dark, without uttering a word. In front of her house, Katalin looked for her keys under the flagstone at the doorstep, opened the door, and pushed me ahead of her. “Go upstairs, François. I’ll follow.”
In the bedroom, Katalin proudly raised her dress up to her breasts, and in a low voice uttered this command: “Kiss my belly, François, and take me slowly, very slowly.”
At the back of the bedroom, on a dimly lit wall, hung the effigy of Caterina Cornaro. Her glance was calm now, but the image was empty. The woman who was offering herself to me had gently assumed the ardor of that ancient face.
I withdrew from Katalin; then she said in a hoarse voice, “Kiss the little one, François, kiss him with all your heart, or he’ll die.”
I placed my mouth between her legs, and there I spoke, there I sang. It wasn’t in the tongue of Goethe or of Bembo, but in a tongue—Katalina’s—whose meaning escaped me:
“That’s enough! Now get up and leave, François! You must forget me forever.”
7
Aseroë
THERE ARE PROCESSIONS of words; beneath every funereal word the dead are gathered, beseeching us to lend them the power of saying “I” one last time. Is this voice our own?
The words travel from mouth to mouth, from book to book; a murmur arises and grows progressively louder as it disappears. Over the course of this process, stories fall to pieces; others, patched together, arise to replace them. Tawdry metaphors abound; in order to come up with a single decent image, the spoken word lacks a true road on which to travel from its origin to its final destination. I know nothing about this road; in the end, I allow myself to be led along by a language I do not know. Though I don’t really understand it, at times it seems to offer itself to me without my noticing.
The Testament of Orpheus, germinal words, a guardian angel, an aphasic Cassandra, a witness to lightning, the portrait of a young woman at once innocent and perverse—all these figures of forgetting guide my sentences. The procession of words goes from oblivion to oblivion. Each word, a sign of death and of life, of defeat and annunciation, relates the return of Orpheus, but his full story—barely glimpsed—escapes. I may collapse before finding what needed to be said in order to secure solace. Orpheus does not exist—which is why he so disturbs us.
Orpheus, precisely. I traveled to Laon with B. in the early fall to see a fourth-century mosaic on which an anonymous artist had represented the god, his lyre, and the beasts charmed by his song. The forms seemed naïve, but I liked the composition and the palette of colors—blues, greens, golds, blacks.
For the unknown author of this work, the Orphic songs were already nothing more than simple nursery rhymes, but they still preserved the glamor of magical formulas. A few centuries earlier, Apollonius of Rhodes—at the beginning of his Argonautica—attributed this double mission to Orpheus:
What can song still mean when the memory of a disaster as old as the world is mingled with the urge for an originating word? Those who wish to listen are few in number. The shops, the churches, the streets, the loudspeakers all speak at every moment of the death of Orpheus—hands clapping at the announcement that “The Price Is Right,” tinny slogans, canned laughter. I no longer hear common nouns. Have meanings been stripped from every verb, have names been removed from every object? So many real yet invisible wounds. Zombie words wandering here and there, looking in vain for their correspondence to things.
In the thickness of lies, oblivion precedes every memorable deed; poems are nothing more than thin fissures—cracks that refuse a world where the violation of light and song announces nothing but atrocities to come. On the road to Laon, I heard shouts in broad daylight. I was overcome with anguish. Cries calling out, me unable to answer.
The Laon mosaic occupied a wall in the great hall of the municipal building. We asked for a key from the concierge, who told us, “Except for a few foreign tourists, I don’t get many visitors. It’s a room where children go to draw.” On the other walls, we saw gouaches and collages, with bright colors, guarded by a row of antique busts—Cicero, Demosthenes, Caesar—which hadn’t been used as models for decades.
Before leaving the room, I saw a dog at Orpheus’s feet. This unobtrusive dog had neither the grace nor the radiant colors of the wild beasts and birds summoned by the master of song. The dog was listening without drawing attention to himself. I should have noticed him sooner, for this animal belongs, like the lyre and the Phrygian cap, among the attributes of Orpheus. What sort of role could such a dog play in the legend? Was he capable of following his master into Hell and returning unharmed? The ancient poems say nothing about this; but the moment I saw the mutt, so modest, so attentive, I ceased to imagine the celestial transports caused by some primordial sound-and light- show (Chaos, Night, Day, the original Logos…) and I said to myself, My place is among the eternity of beasts! We humans are now lower than the animals. Dumbed down by our modern surroundings, we no longer understand a single thing. I should be like this dog; that would be ideal! To become as Orpheus’ dog—this, luckily, still remains a possibility. Rilke, my most constant companion, would not greet the idea with sarcasm. In his Eighth Elegy, the song rises to its apogee the moment he recognizes in animals the VISION OF THE OPEN: