EXTRAS: A lot of cigarette smoke, everyone is smoking including, covertly, the steward behind the bar. Smoke seeps between the fingers of his loosely clenched fist resting on his buttocks. The fat woman is smoking. The man on the mobile phone is smoking as he mutters into his little plastic box. I have a metallic taste in my mouth, and am seized by a sudden, embittering image of Diane S. — naked, laughing.
COMMENTS: The English countryside has never looked so drained and dead under this oppressive pewter sky. The barman beckons … Now I have my mushroom-and-salami omelette, a piebald yellow with brown patches, steaming suspiciously, a curious, gamey but undeniably foodlike smell seems suddenly to have pervaded the entire carriage, obliterating all other odors. Everyone is looking at me. I screw the top off my “Red Wine” and fill my glass as we hurtle across Norfolk. Gastric juices squirt. I’m starving, how is this possible? My mother will have the archetype of an English Sunday lunch waiting for me. A roast, cooked gray, potatoes and two or three vegetables, a lake of gravy, cheese and biscuits, her special trifle. I look out the window at the miles of somber green. Rain is spitting on the glass and the soldiers have started to sing. Time for my omelette. I know what I am doing but it is a bad sign, this, the beginning of the end. I am deliberately setting out to ruin (because, let’s face it, you cannot, before lunch, lunch) lunch.
N Is for N
NGUYEN N, Laotian bellelettrist and amateur philosopher. Born in Vientiane, Laos, 1883; died Paris, France, 22 February 1942. N’s family was of bourgeois stock, comparatively wealthy, Francophone and Francophile. Nguyen, a precocious but somewhat unhealthy youth, yearned for Paris, but World War I delayed his arrival there until he was twenty-four.
But after humid Vientiane Paris proved noisome and frustrating. The severe winter of 1920 caused his health to fail (something cardiovascular) and he went south to recuperate, to the Côte d’Azur. Strengthened, he decided to settle there. He earned his living as a math tutor and semiprofessional table tennis player, participating in the short-lived Ping-Pong leagues that briefly flourished on that sunny littoral in the 1920s.
And it was there that he wrote his little masterpiece, Les Analectes de Nguyen N (Toulon: Monnier, 1928), a copy of which I found last year in Hyères, its cerise wrapper dusty and sun-bleached, its pages uncut. A sequence of epiphanic images and apothegms, its tone fragile and nervy, balancing perilously between the profound and the banal. “Somewhere snow is gently falling,” Nguyen writes amid the mimosa and the umbrella pines, “and I still feel pain.” English cannot do their tender sincerity full justice.
After the book’s success Nguyen was taken up by the cultural salons of Paris, where he returned permanently in 1931. He is a tenant of the footnotes of literary history; the unidentified face at the café table; a shadowy figure on the perimeter of many a memoir and biography.
He wrote once to André Gide, who had taxed him on his unusual surname, which is not uncommon in Laos “… It is properly pronounced unnnnhhhh, effectively three syllables, the final ’h’s being as plosive as possible, if you can imagine that. Ideally, after introducing me, you should be very slightly out of breath.”
The war brought penury. Nguyen went to work in the kitchens of Paris’s largest Vietnamese restaurant, where he discovered a talent for the decorative garnish. His lacy carrot carnations, scallion lilies and translucent turnip roses were miniature works of art. In between shifts he wrote his short autobiography, Comment ciseler les légumes (Paris: Plon et Noel, 1943—very rare), which was published posthumously.
Nguyen N was run over in the blackout one gloomy February night by a gendarme on a bicycle. He died instantly.
The Persistence of Vision
Persistence of vision is a trick of the eye, an ability the eye possesses to fill in the gaps between discrete images and make them appear perfectly contiguous. This is what makes animation work.
Murray and Ginsberg’s Dictionary of Cinema (1949)
4:05 A.M. The island. Seated on the terrace in front of my house. This is what I tried to retain. This is what I wanted to come to me unbidden from those three years. The soft explosion of a pile of leaves. A bare-breasted Gypsy girl dancing for some native soldiers. Orange snakes uncoiling in the glossy panels of an antique automobile. Big papery blue blossoms of hydrangea. A red printed smile on a square of tissue. A honeyed triangle of toast on a faience plate. Tennis in Sausalito. The huge pewtery light of the salt pans. The bleached teak decks of a motor yacht. A rare cloud trapped in a cloud-reflecting pool.
It was in the gusty autumnal pathways of the park that I first saw her. Her small dog had nosed its way into a crackling and shifting drift of plane leaves and she was tugging crossly at the lead, shouting, “Mimi, no, come on, really, you impossible beast!” in her surprisingly deep voice. But it was her wrists that held my attention first and provoked that curious breathlessness that I always associate with moments of intense irritation or intense desire. They were very thin, with the bony nodule of the wristbone, the ulna, particularly prominent as she tugged and heaved on recalcitrant Mimi’s crocodile-skin leash. She was bundled up against the astringent frostiness of the day in an old ankle-length apple-green tweed coat, a black cashmere shawl and a soft felt hat that concealed her figure totally, but the length and slimness of her pale wrists and swift computations and assessments thereafter — a slightly hooked nose, sunglasses of an opaque ultramarine hue, a corkscrew of auburn hair — were enough for me to lose concentration and allow Gilbert, my adored but ineffably stupid Labrador pup, to gallop by me, unchecked, from whatever shrubbery or tree bole he was dousing, and hurl himself into Mimi’s leaf-drift.
The soft explosion of dry leaves, the terrified yips and idiot barkings, the cuffs administered to Gilbert’s golden rump, the apologies, the pacifying of Mimi, the crouchings-down, the straightenings-up, the removal of sunglasses, the removal of a calfskin glove from my right hand, the briefest gripping of those thin cold ringless (ringless!) fingers were achieved in a kind of roaring silence as if one half of my brain were registering the full tapestry of sounds available (the dogs, our voices and above the traffic the querulous where-the-hell-are-you? toot of an impatient motorist, blocked in by a delivery van or waiting for someone), while the other half, as if in some dust-free, shadowless laboratory, were pedantically analyzing and observing. Noting: the ability to raise one eyebrow (the left) without any change in expression; the depth of the blue hollows in the undulations of bone and skin where the clavicle joined the manubrium below her throat; the wide mouth and the perfect unevenness of her teeth. Assessing: the exact moment when to effect the introduction; the exchange of doggy arcana (“A Norfolk terrier? Quite rare, I think.” “Norwich, actually.” “Really?”); the casual invitation absentmindedly offered just as one was saying goodbye, about to set off: “Look, I don’t suppose you’d fancy—?” The observable pause, the flick of the eye toward the east gate of the park, the decisive, independent jut of the chin and the tautening of the lips to suppress a smile as she accepted.
We sat at a small table and she rubbed a small circle, tugging her coat sleeve down over the heel of her hand, in the bleary condensation of the window to peer out at the motorcars speeding past. She chose hot chocolate and smoked a French cigarette. I had an apple juice and tried not to sneeze. Her name was — is — Golo.