“I think the urban guerrillas of São Paulo are being killed left and right,” I said.
“What’s killing us, meanwhile, is the heat in summer and the cold in winter. And sometimes boredom, because we’re getting old, and boredom is one of the afflictions of old age. I’m going to tell you a story, Diodorus, listen up. At the end of the fifties or the beginning of the sixties, André Breton invited five young surrealists to his house. Four of these surrealists had just arrived in Paris. The fifth was a Parisian and something of an introvert. In other words, he had hardly any friends, or no friends at all. The young men came to Breton’s house. There was a Russian, an Italian, a German, and a Spaniard. All of them spoke French, of course. In fact, the German spoke better French than the young Frenchman, who, in addition to being an introvert, stuttered and was dyslexic. So there they are at Breton’s house, these five young men, the oldest twenty-two and the youngest eighteen. They’re a little bit surprised because Breton’s wife and his daughter aren’t there, nor are any of the famous surrealists. Famous to the enthusiastic young men, at least, maybe for having published a poem in some magazine that only bibliophiles remember today, or some so-called surrealist collection since fallen into oblivion. You know, the court of mediocrities that kings must suffer.”
“But Breton wasn’t a king,” I protested.
“You’re right, he wasn’t. A chancellor, then. Or Minister of Foreign Affairs, agreed?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Listen up. Here we have these five young men and all of a sudden Breton appears. He greets each of them by name. He acts as if he knows them very well. He asks them questions. He nods. The young men are just as he had imagined. They spend the afternoon together. Then they go out to eat. They wander the streets of Paris. A Paris that is dying, Diodorus, a Paris whose scepter shines on the other side of the ocean, in New York. But they walk the streets of Paris and talk about everything. The young men feel urgency in Breton’s words, the radiance of a plan that has yet to be revealed to them. Finally, they go into a café, any old café, where Breton asks whether they’re willing to go down into the sewers and live there for ten years. The young men think Breton is speaking figuratively. He repeats the question. The young men reply with other questions. What kind of sewers? The sewers of Paris? The sewers of the mind? The sewers of art? Breton doesn’t answer. They drink. They talk about other things. Then they pay and go out. They’re lost again in the maze of a bustling old neighborhood. Suddenly, in a side street full of the graffiti of minor political groups, Breton indicates a wooden door and they go into a room. It looks like a toy maker’s warehouse. The room has a door that leads to another room, which in turn has a door that leads to another room. And so on. The young men even spot fishing gear along the way. Breton has a bundle of keys that he uses to open all the doors. Finally, they reach the last room. Here the only door is the one they’ve come through. But then Breton leads them into a corner and opens a trapdoor. They climb down. First Breton, who picks up a flashlight hanging by the top steps, and then the five young men. They reach an octagonal room. Surprised, they hear the rush of water, confirming that they’re inside the Paris sewer system. On the walls of the room, a painter or mongoloid child has drawn some chalk figures half-blotted out by the damp. Breton asks again whether they’re prepared to live for ten years in the sewers. The young men listen, their eyes on his, and then they look again at the chalk drawings. They all say yes. They leave the room with Breton in the lead once more. When they reach the first room—or the last, depending how you look at it; the one that looks like a toy maker’s warehouse—he takes four sets of keys out of a box and presents them to four of the young men, giving his own set to the fifth. Then he shakes each of their hands and says goodbye. The young men are left alone. For a few seconds, they stand there motionless, staring at each other. Then the Russian locks the door and they return to the sewers.”
Suddenly the man who was talking on the other end of the line, the man calling from Paris, was silent, as if describing this scene (or remembering it, maybe) had exhausted him. I could hear him breathing. I thought he was having some kind of asthma attack, or heart attack.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Perfectly fine… Perfectly fine…”
Then he coughed or cleared his throat noisily and was silent again. After a few seconds, he began to hum a tune, some French pop song that had yet to reach Guiana, where music arrived from the United States before it arrived from France or Italy or Germany, if music even existed in those countries.
“Where were we?” he asked suddenly.
“With the young men who decided to stay in the sewers.”
“Of course. Listen up. Those young men stay in the sewers and form the nucleus of the Clandestine Surrealist Group. Of course, they can come out whenever they want. Did I tell you that each of them has a set of keys that will let them exit at any time?”
“Yes.”
“In other words, they aren’t prisoners. No one is in charge. They realize this immediately. Not even Breton, who gives away his own set of keys before he leaves. They’re free to leave, go back to their garrets, take a train and lose themselves forever in the stations of Europe. In fact, some nights they do go out. They’re young. They’re more or less able-bodied. They have needs that can’t be satisfied in the sewers. Sometimes they attend gatherings with the surrealists and they shake Breton’s hand. He’s cordial with them, as attentive as ever, but they never talk about the CSG. Breton sees them but doesn’t see them. Breton remembers them but doesn’t remember them. They meet people, of course. They meet Nora Mitrani, who sees them but doesn’t see them. They meet Alain Jouffroy, who sees them but doesn’t see them. They talk to Joyce Mansour. Joyce Mansour sees them but doesn’t see them. Not that it matters to her. Well, she fucks one of them. You have no idea, Diodorus, how beautiful Joyce Mansour was. They talk to José Pierre, Roberto Matta, Jean Schuster, sometimes they get to be friendly with them, the point is, they have a social life, they go to the movies, they join a gym and learn how to box, they sleep with girls, one of them sleeps with boys, sometimes in summer they take trips to the Adriatic or the Norwegian fjords. Don’t get the wrong impression: they don’t do all of this together, certainly not, each of them has his own set of keys, they go out on their own, sometimes they might go months without seeing one another, because the sewers are as big as Paris, an inside-out Paris, except that in this private Paris, instead of citizens there are the waste products of citizens, their excreta, their urine, their tears, their sweat, their semen, their vomit, their fetuses, their blood, in other words, the shadow of those citizens, their tenacious shadow, one might add, and the only risk that our five young men run in their investigations—and it’s a small risk—is coming across groups of municipal employees, sewer inspectors, drain decloggers who regularly venture down into the labyrinthine city and who are very easy to detect, because the decloggers are afraid of the methane gases that accumulate in blind galleries and they take great precautions. Their shouts, Diodorus, can be heard miles away. The shouts of the decloggers. Their laughter, their jokes, their eagerness to finish the work and get out. Our young men, meanwhile, are in no hurry at all. They know that their work will never be finished. That’s why in the summer they run off without a peep. There is one rule that they agree to follow, though they don’t always stick to it. Like in hospitals, one person must always be on guard. Four go out, one stays behind. No big deal. The one who stays behind keeps working. And so do those who go out, in some sense. And so the work, the project, begins to take shape, branches, grows, though not in linear fashion. It’s like a novel, to give you some sense, a novel that doesn’t begin at the beginning. In fact, Diodorus, it’s a novel (like all novels, really) that doesn’t begin in the novel, in the book-object that contains it, understand? Its first pages are in some other book, or in a back alley where a crime has been committed, or in a bird that watches a group of children playing, unseen.”