Veiled
A furniture salesman who had just purchased a second-hand armchair discovered that, in the hollow part of the backrest, one of the former owners had hidden a diary. For some reason — death, forgetfulness, abandonment, seizure — the diary had remained there, and the salesman, an expert in furniture construction, had come upon it accidentally as he tapped the back of the armchair to test its sturdiness. That day he stayed late in the store stacked full of beds, chairs, tables, and dressers, hunched over his desk in the back office reading the diary by lamplight. Day by day, the diary revealed the emotional problems of its author, and the salesman, who was an intelligent and sensible man, understood at once that the woman had been hiding her true nature, and that by some incomprehensible twist of fate he now knew her far better than any of the people who had lived alongside her and whom she mentioned in the diary.
The salesman sat thinking. For a while the idea that someone could keep something hidden in her house, something veiled from the world — a diary or whatever it might be — seemed strange to him, almost impossible, until a few minutes later, at the moment he stood up and began to tidy his desk before heading home, he noted, with no little astonishment, that he himself had, in some places, hidden things the rest of the world knew nothing about. In his house, for example, in the attic, in a tin box buried among old magazines and useless junk, the salesman had hidden a roll of bills that thickened from time to time, and whose existence was unknown even to his wife and children. The salesman could not say precisely why he was saving that money, but little by little it had been adding to the unpleasant certainty that his whole life was defined not by the quotidian activities he performed by the light of day, but by that roll of bills crumbling in the attic; and that undoubtedly all of his actions, at their base, were aimed at adding another bill every once in a while to that crumbling roll.
As he turned on the neon sign, filling the black air over the pavement with a violet light, the salesman was seized with another memory: he had been looking for a pencil sharpener in his eldest son’s room when he stumbled upon a series of pornographic pictures his son had hidden in a dresser drawer. The salesman had put back the pictures immediately, less from embarrassment than from the fear that his son would think he was in the habit of snooping.
During dinner, the salesman observed his wife; for the first time in thirty years it occurred to him that she might also be keeping something hidden, something so personal and so deeply buried that, even if she wanted to, even under torture, she could not have confessed it. The salesman felt a sort of vertigo. It wasn’t some banal fear of being betrayed or swindled that made his head spin as if he were drunk, but the certainty that, just as he stood at the brink of old age, he might find himself compelled to modify the most elemental notions of his life. Or what he had called his life: because his life, his real life, according to his new intuition, turned out to be in another place, in the darkness, veiled from events, and that life seemed more remote to him than the very outskirts of the universe.
The Mirror
For the boys at the office it’s already completely natural, and almost all of them think of me as a good coworker. They even look out for me, and there is a tacit understanding between us whereby they accept me and I keep my private life out of the office, even though this divides my life in two. They consider me cultured, tasteful, delicate. It is difficult for a person like me to make it into his forties, I realize, and although they tolerate my idiosyncrasy, I feel that the time for revelries has ended and that maturity has come at quite a cost.
When book vendors come to the office, the boys always consult me before buying a set. I recommend Huxley (Aldous), Mauriac, Shakespeare, firstly because anyone can enjoy Shakespeare, and moreover because Shakespeare is such a well-respected author that someone might get offended if I didn’t recommend buying his complete works. I never recommend Oscar Wilde or André Gide so as not to arouse suspicion, but I myself read them with an enthusiastic sarcasm, I brandish them in silence as evidence, alone, against no one, in our ancient house in the south where my mother and sister, old and deaf, move about in the evening shouting and almost swimming in the violet light that filters through the blinds. Since my room is the one at the end of the hall and I am the one supporting the family, on the days I don’t stay out drinking wine until the last bars have closed in the wee hours of the morning, I receive “visitors.” Sometimes, in the past few years, I’ve been obligated to pay, or at least provide a little gift.
It’s just that there is a high price to seeing oneself in such bright light, a price that cannot be reckoned in cash or in kind. The others turn into me, and I am the others, so that I get back all that I give. To make the world in my image, I have had to turn myself into the world, and I spread myself out like it, offered up, open. I pass over the world along with everyone who passes over me. In the great mirror of love, the world and I regard each other, surprised, each in the guise of the other, attempting to read into that manifold inversion as into an impossible palimpsest.
My Name is Pigeon Garay
My name is Pigeon Garay. I’ve lived in Paris for five years (Hôtel Minerve, 13, rue des Écoles, 5eme). Last year, in July, Carlos Tomatis dropped by for a visit. He was fatter than ever, nearly 200 pounds I’d guess, smoking cigarettes as he has been doing for the past seven or eight years, and we talked in my room, sitting before the window with the lights off, until dawn. I still remember the complex, rhythmic sound of his breathing emerging from the darkness as the temperature of our dialogue began to rise.
Two or three days later he went to London, leaving me to steep in an atmosphere of memories part-rancid, part-renewed, part-dead. There was something in that spider web of memories that recalled a living thing, the dying cub that trembles a bit, still warm, when one gently pokes it to see if it has died, with the tip of a stick or a finger. Afterward the thing stopped flowing and the animal went rigid, dead, made only of edges and cartilage.
My name, I say, is Pigeon Garay. So to speak.
Memories
Here you have me practically losing my voice and full of memories. They must be governed by some law; that is certain. But to discover that law it is necessary to empty oneself of them, to turn oneself inside-out like a glove. Everyone knows, anyway, that they obey no chronology. The philosophical prison we all carry within us has unleashed an assault onto our memories, decreeing unto them the fiction of chronology. And yet they continue, obstinately, to be our only freedom.
Let them at least become an obsession. Then they would obey a sort of law of exceptions, strict and absolute. Someone called them “incessant.” With a regularity all their own, certain memories of the smallest incidents, without any apparent narrative content, return again and again to our consciousness, neutral and monotonous, until, having returned so often, our consciousness invests them with feelings and categorizes them: just as when a stray dog passes by to contemplate us silently, every day, in front of our door, we end up giving him a name.