“Clear as day,” I said.
“Which means that our young men discover that they can be away from the sewers as much as they like. The work travels with them. They can be tourists, go to Greece or the Philippines, they can spend weeks paddling the Amazon, what a delight to paddle the Amazon with eyes half-shut, life sighing and creaking around you; to sleep in hammocks, listening to women talking to little girls in Portuguese. In fact, Diodorus, listen up, the five young men soon discover that it isn’t necessary to live in the sewers of Paris. It’s enough to visit one day a month. And yet the sewer system has become a well-furnished metaphor for them. They have their workshops there, their studies, their libraries. They discuss the possibility of leaving, of course. Each of them proposes a different place. But in the end, they stay. Oh, woe is me, in the end, they stay.”
For a while I didn’t hear anything. I got the sense that the man on the other end of the line had begun to cry or that he was sighing one sigh after another.
“Where do you think they get the money to lead this life, to live like pashas and bums?” he asked suddenly with renewed vigor.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“The same question was on their minds back then. Because they had money, I can promise you that. Once a month, in one of the rooms on the way to their lair, they would find an envelope containing a not insignificant sum that they divided among the five of them. At first, the logical thing—because logic, Diodorus, is like a madhouse—was to think that Breton was financing them. The work in which they were immersed was absorbing and soon they stopped thinking about it. All they knew for certain was that they had more than enough money to support themselves and to indulge in some Oriental luxuries, though at this point in the story two of them were living practically like clochards. But in 1966, Breton dies and for the first few months they speculate about the possibility that their funding will dry up. The money, however, continues to arrive punctually. So they raise the question again. Who is paying? Who is financing them? Who has an interest in seeing their work continue? Naturally, their thoughts turn to the CIA, the KGB, the French Ministry of Culture. After a quick examination of these possibilities, they rule them out as absurd. The group is clearly opposed to the KGB and the CIA. For several nights after dinner, as they smoke and drink cognac or whiskey, they speculate that the Minister of Culture has gone mad. Try to imagine: these young men spend the day alone, apart, working in the mysterious boulevards and streets of the sewers, and when night falls they turn on their flashlights and walk, maybe whistling as they go, to the first room they glimpsed, the room that Breton showed them. Here they shower, or not; they change clothes, or not; and they sit down at the table. One of them serves as cook. Usually it’s the Frenchman, the Italian, or the Spaniard. Sometimes—rarely—it’s the Russian. Never the German. Also, it isn’t a regular occurrence. It only happens when they have something urgent to discuss, a nightmare to explain, for example, or the last piece of a puzzle to find. Someone is financing them. That someone isn’t Breton, since he’s dead. Nor is it an American or Soviet spy agency. But someone is in on their secret and possesses a set of keys, since the money isn’t found under the door of the toy warehouse but in an inner room, which can only be reached by going through two or three locked doors. For days they ponder the mystery. They lie in wait for the visitor, they set traps for him, they hide inside a wardrobe waiting for him to come. But their capitalist partner, who seems to have a special sense for detecting their presence, doesn’t fall into any of the traps. They build a curious system of mirrors by which they intend to get a glimpse of him, and which essentially involves bouncing a reflection from one mirror to another through a keyhole. Finally, after all their attempts fail, they watch a detective movie and realize that the solution is as simple as installing a movie camera in a hidden spot. And they obtain satisfactory results, Diodorus.”
“What are the results? Who is bringing them the money?” I asked.
“A woman. An older woman. The picture is a little out of focus. After they develop the film, all they see is a door opening and a woman dressed in black, her face covered with a silk veil, taking two small steps and removing an envelope from a bag. Then the woman retreats, and that’s all. The next month, they install two cameras. Same scene, but longer and with one fundamental difference. The woman who enters is dressed in black, her face covered with a veil, but it isn’t the woman from the month before. It’s a different person. Shorter, maybe; heavier and less quick. Suddenly, our five young men realize that everything, the female backers included, are part of the same project. They keep filming. The woman who turns up in the third month is extremely tall, wearing black pants and a black turtleneck sweater. Instead of a hat, she has on a beret. There is a black satin handkerchief over her face, not a veil. In the fourth month, it’s a little old lady who can barely stand upright, though she carries herself with pride and a certain style—call it the smoldering embers of style. Her dress is black, her face is covered with black tulle, her parchment-like wrists display bracelets of incalculable value. In the fifth month, the woman is young, though by the way she walks—the young men watch over and over again, like children spellbound by a western—her experience with love and maybe crime too, is plain. This woman is wearing dark glasses instead of a veil and this permits them to divine the deadly iciness of her gaze. Her gaze, we might add, is her cheekbones and lips. In the sixth month, the woman is wearing dark glasses too and the rest of her face and head are covered with a turban. She is tall and her movements are precise, though there is something shy about her. When she leaves the envelope of money, the young men notice her hands and realize that she is black. In the seventh month, the woman arrives singing. She interrupts her ditty only to bring a handkerchief to her nose and blow. The veil is pushed to one side, and she fixes it with the clumsiness of someone who’s had too much to drink. Her black dress is wrinkled and her hat looks as if it’s made of paper. She might very well have slept in her clothes. Her eyes, which the veil can’t conceal, shine with the determination of someone punching and scratching her way down a long corridor of dreams. And so on, until a year has gone by. Then the first woman appears again, followed by the second, and the third, and so on consecutively. At this point, the young men decide to follow them. The project of pursuit is complicated and involves leaving a trail of bread crumbs or pebbles, except that they can’t drop the bread crumbs or pebbles themselves, since the women seem to possess a sixth sense that alerts them to their proximity, so it’s the women who must drop them. After a while this flurry of activity bears fruit. The three women whom they’ve followed turn out to be surrealist widows. Two of them are the widows of painters whose work is rising in value on the international market. The third is the widow of a poet possessing a large family fortune. When they follow the fourth, it turns out that she too is the widow of a painter. They find the others by means of a much simpler system: they track down the surrealists who left lots of money when they died and then they go in search of the widows. The next step is to turn up at the house of one of these widows and interrogate her about why the women are covering their expenses, but they decide not to take this step, because somehow they feel the time is not yet right. Once this problem has been solved, they immerse themselves in their work again. In their masterwork. Do you know what that masterwork is, Diodorus?”