Greatness, true luxury, lies in that somewhat aristocratic disdain, not in the worst sense of the word, of always doing things by halves — the tumbler of brandy left partly undrunk on the terrace of a bar, the coins not fully gathered up from the dish on which the waiter has brought the change from your order, the last bits of sauce not mopped up, whole evenings of drowsiness and complacency, wasted without guilt for there is more than enough life to go around, because there’s plenty of time yet. This is the attitude that stands in contrast to that of the miserable wretch driven by the most visceral and tight-fisted need to see poetry in the idea of draining every last drop of what life has to offer. And so he throws nothing away, and saves for a rainy day, stingily hoarding the leftovers to be polished off later, much as a dog that has had its fill might bury bones next to a tree so as not to let a single ounce of food go to waste, and he dunks every last churro in his order of hot chocolate, no matter that he’s full to bursting, whether or not he has any room left in his belly. It’s a thousand times better to always leave a little something on the plate, to thumb your nose elegantly at part of the banquet, to dine, say, with a ravishing lady and gracefully allow her to escape with her life. And, in that same haughty vein, to abandon life at the midway point, to up and leave, just like that, as one might leave untouched what remains of an ice-cream cone now melted or a saucer bearing loose change.
Yet the mind is wont to erase such ideas at a stroke, much as it silences other questions that do perhaps matter when talk turns to escape: If you shatter all the crockery against the wall, how will you then blow off steam in future? If you sever all ties, what bonds will you then shrug off? If you abandon all point of reference, from where or from what can you now retreat? And the clincher, the central refrain of a woebegone song of destitution and abandonment that refuses to fade out altogether in your head: To what end your footsteps through the world, the new cities, the seas you cross, the paths you take, the horizons, the storms through which you pass and which pass through you, the fruits you grasp, your glory or your downfall, your wretched self lost in the desert of what lies ahead, if the eyes that once looked on your life are now closed?
4 (man overboard)
Christmas is the hardest time of year to get some time to yourself. There are people who call you at all hours to make sure you’re OK and aren’t festering in gloom during the holidays. They will not leave you be. They sign you up for dinners, they insist on taking you out on the town. I felt the need for a quick trip, to get a little distance from it all, and so it was that my 2010 began in Paris, a plastic cup in my hand and party music boring into my brain under an Eiffel Tower lit up in dazzling, electric blue. Thousands of people taking snapshots of the metallic chill and the effect of the laser beams on the steel and the sky, while dozens of hooded, tattooed youths lined up against every wall in a large, cordoned-off radius to be patted down by the police, hands behind their heads, feet spread as far apart as possible. In the neighboring streets, cars burned amid the sound of sirens and puddles of champagne.
It was fiercely cold the following day. Beneath the snowflakes that fell as if in slow motion, I walked the two or three blocks that separated my hotel from Montparnasse Cemetery, then whiled away a couple of hours between its walls, pausing before the same graves that had drawn me to them the first time I had set foot there several years before — the graves of Duras, Cortázar, Vallejo, Baudelaire — this time adding to my brief itinerary a couple of tombstones to which I had before paid little heed, pausing also before the grave of Serge Gainsbourg, covered with flowers, rain-sodden cigarettes, handwritten notes, and miniature bottles of liquor, and that of Jean Seberg, the lone huntress, who finally secured her spot beneath the funereal earth at the eighth request. Squatting on my haunches in front of each one, running my fingertips over the damp slabs as if the marble might offer up something akin to an answer, musing vaguely on the way of things and again wondering why it is that even my deepest desires, even when they go hand in hand with urgency, fury, or maelstrom, always materialize with a question mark. Sensing the perfume of the black roses, of the giant petals I cannot recognize, all of the sorrow laid out there, in the true heart of the world, around the cypresses, beneath the snow, beneath the stone, beneath all of the footsteps, beneath everything.
Paris was nothing more than a boulevard of ashes, so whispered Moustaki to my adolescent self from a red plastic battery-powered cassette player as I lay on my bed, at a time when the world’s cities first began to take shape in my mind, with their bridges, their secret places, and their towers, based on three or four photos I had stumbled upon and music aplenty. And that, a boulevard of ashes, was precisely what the streets were to me until I reached the Mirabeau Bridge. I had no way of knowing which side Paul Celan had leapt from on the night of the 19th to the 20th of April, 1970, and so I picked one at random and stood there a good long while, gazing at the water. I have never set much store by the time-honored metaphor that holds that life is a river that carries us along. Rather it strikes me that if time is pushing us onward, it does so while at the same time passing through us, wearing us down, transforming us from head to toe. It is not a question of the current simply carrying us, just as we are, from one spot to another, closer to the sea or to death with each passing minute. If there is no escaping the hours and days, tomorrow or the past, this is because yesterday has warped us, that’s all there is to it; it has taken us from A to B, leaving within us traces of calamity and weariness. I’d be lying if I said that my footsteps had led me to that bridge purely by chance. Peering over those railings had been the main reason for my trip to Paris. In order to arrive at or manufacture that moment, I had crossed the Pyrenees two days previously, catching a high-speed train in Pau with the sole intention of standing there a good long while, watching the water enter the arch of the bridge only to disappear behind my back, bound for the ocean. It’s strange how we sometimes choose the places in which to find answers or a simple tonic to ease the sorrow that possesses us, or to which vanquished gods we beg for light, the baffling way in which we scour the world for altars to kneel before and sacred moments, dubious symbols, gazes that take naked snapshots of us from up on high in a broken sky. As I contemplated the current from that spot, imagining the thunderous sound made by a body dropping like a stone from the railings at an hour when the whole world is asleep, I was in fact seeking to find out whether or not, when push came to shove, I wished to carry on living. Or, more to the point, whether or not I would carry on living. This was what had brought me there, although I believe that I could never, at that point or ever, have put a finger on quite why.