Suzie slaps down a cup of coffee on my table.
“I only drink tea, Ma’am.”
Her cold eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean what do I mean?”
“We don’t serve tea here.”
She stalks off and I go back to my reading. I dip in and out of the book. I open it, I read a stanza or accompany Basho for a time, then close the book again. Lost in my dream. Basho has this ability to be immediately alive, every time. Here, only Whitman has the same energy. Now I’m back in sync with Basho. Just as I feel my backache returning, I come upon this passage where Basho is complaining about the same pain. Often, pain allows us to recognize another human being.
A terrible day! His backache has returned. This is the first time he has complained about it. Just after Sakata. The heavy air, the rain, worst of all the humidity. But, as he says himself, “Enough of that.” He pushes on despite it all and stops in front of the “Send-Back-the-Dog” which wears its name so well. He cannot wait to be inside the inn and asleep. But two women and an old man are chatting away in the next room, and it proves impossible to rest. Finally, sleep comes, but too late. Tired again this morning.
I order a hamburger. That’s what you do if you want to go unnoticed in America. The service is efficient here. A big empty expanse, except for a few grayish customers lost in the decor. It smells of wet carpet and cold sweat. At the bar, the waitress is talking with a young dishwasher. Her laughter is strange, a mixture of nervousness and malevolence. A stooped-over man has been trying to talk to them. They pretend they don’t know he’s there, they don’t even bother to turn their backs on him. Someone standing right in front of you but who doesn’t see you. Deep and endless indifference. As if people had no link with one another: the heavy reality of the end of the afternoon. Everything’s gone to hell since the siesta disappeared from our sundials. The human machine is not made to be awake and alert for eighteen hours straight. A time of rest is essential. Industrialized society did away with the siesta and cranked up the machine further. To keep up, you have to use drugs. All kinds of drugs. Suzie is on both cigarettes and coffee. It’s free for her here.
Basho imagines foot travel as a way of washing the dirt of reality from his skin. Haiku is just a cheap bar of soap. I’m still with Basho when she plops herself down in front of me.
“What are you doing here?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I’m finishing my fries.”
“What are you reading?”
“Basho.”
A suspicious look.
“Who’s he?”
“A Japanese poet.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“No.”
“You Japanese or something?”
“What do you think?”
“Are you a cop by any chance?”
“Hardly.”
“’Cause we’ve had the cops here three times this week. Ever since that business at the Dog Café. We’ve been in the Red Light since 1954…. Get the picture?”
We size each other up for a while.
“Why would I be a cop?”
“People come here to eat. . In ten years, I’ve never seen anyone with a book, let alone a Japanese book.”
“It’s only a translation.”
The young dishwasher calls out: “Suzie!” She waves in his direction, she’ll be right there.“You can finish your fries, then you’re gone.”
“I didn’t know this was a private club.”
“I serve who I want to…. and you’re bothering the customers. Look, Réjean got up and left. The people you see have been coming here for at least twenty years. This is their last stop before the street. I have to protect them. . Can you understand that?”
She goes over to the cash register where an old man has been trying to count his change for the last fifteen minutes. She grabs the coins off the counter and throws them into the cash drawer. The person who doesn’t count will always have an advantage over the one who does.
While I was locked in conversation with Suzie, the restaurant filled up with threatening shadows. Silent men, colorless and odorless. As they eat, they look up and shoot me glances that are neither curious nor mistrustful. What name can I give that look? I feel like I’m being sized up by someone who already saw the film and didn’t like it. Apparently our smell is what bothers them, the odor of ambition, since they are completely devoid of it. Meanwhile, we’re still making plans. Our plans are a mixture of money, will and clichés. What do they smell like? They have lost their smell. They’re at the end of the line.
Basho reaches Tsuruga with Tosai. The sky a clear, hard blue. But the innkeeper tells them the weather could change at any time. Hard to believe that this beautiful sky could fill with black threatening clouds at any moment. Yet that’s what happens. The innkeeper was right; he knows his country.Basho will not see the full moon on the Bay of Tsuruga, the secret goal of his journey.
As I go out the door, I turn and see Suzie’s satisfied smile, her false teeth sparkling white. I understand that she never wanted me here in the first place. Not again!
THE NEGRO'S DEFEAT
THIS WILL BE the most difficult thing to decode. First we’ll have to agree on the meaning of the word “smile.” I have a thousand questions about it. What does a smile mean for them? Is it an expression of the face or the mind? What importance do they grant it when they’re at home or elsewhere? Can you smile all by yourself, in your room? If that’s ever happened to me, I’m not aware of it. How many can you execute in a day? I feel as though I’m slowly slipping into a universe where I need to use a language whose grammar escapes me completely. What is a smile worth? I have no idea. What is its function? Do we smile to hide or to reveal something? I wonder if a real smile is given only when we are unaware of it. How is a social smile done? Can it be practised in front of a mirror? Each of the girls in Midori’s group seems to have a particular smile. What would be the difference between Eiko’s and Fumi’s smile? Midori rarely smiles. In any case, I feel it’s a weapon. The British have tried to conquer the world with their stiff upper lip and their umbrellas. The Japanese, with a wide smile and a camera. The Louvre rakes in a bundle with Mona Lisa’s smile. No one laughs in the West. Smiling gives power. Laughter declares the Negro’s defeat. I spend entire days trying to learn the Japanese smile. A smile removed from the face.
A SUNDAY IN THE PROVINCES
MY BODY IN the bath. My mind on the ceiling. Once in a while they unite. And I come to the surface at the point of drowning. A spasm of life. I gasp for breath. Rub my thighs, arms and face hard, awakening the waterlogged cells. I have left the world of water; now I am in the world of air. Bent, my hands over my face, I try to recover my spirits before joining Basho on the road. I write the word “road” and immediately think of Kerouac — an automatic response. Basho did it centuries before he did, and on foot. But now he is on his own, without his friend Sora.
Sora, recovered now, was waiting for him in Osaki.Basho was so celebrated in Osaki that he felt as though he were attending his own funeral. Etsujin danced. The young disciples were joyful. Everyone at the samurai Joko’s house.Basho seemed to have regained fresh strength. It’s always strange to see someone in such good health when you know they’ve been dead for so long: the triumph of the mind.
I watch a sunbeam’s progress across the floor. The telephone close by. I like to read in the bath. I’d always rather read than write. I see myself walking the sunny streets of my childhood, holding my grandmother’s hand. A Sunday in the provinces. A man sitting quietly on his gallery in front of a large table covered with books, all of them open. He was leaning over them, as if contemplating a rich and varied buffet. He moved from book to book with equal excitement, a gourmand. Nothing around him seemed to matter, nothing outside of those appetizing dishes. He seemed so far from us, so beyond our reach — we could see him, but he was obviously elsewhere. My grandmother whispered to me, “He’s a reader!” Right away I thought, “That’s what I’ll do when I grow up. I’ll be a reader.” In the few photos from my teenage years, I always have a book in my hand. Even in the pictures of me talking with my classmates. The ones I run into now remind me of that habit of mine. There was no way, it seemed, to communicate with me. I always had my nose in a book. I have a photo that shows me lying on the floor, reading, with my mother in the background, ironing my school uniform. It must have been a Sunday afternoon. My mother must have urged me to go out, to the square or to the movies with my friends, but I wanted only to read. Back then, neither the sun nor the moon nor girls interested me. Only the journeys that books could provide. I could never get enough. I dreamed that, one day, I would enter a book and never come out. It finally happened with Basho.