Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [97]
“But who was she smiling at twelve months out of twelve all the goddamn day between her four walls and the arcades of her little convent? Was she cloistered there forever? Was she really as I saw her when she stood against the wall in her window frame, Ava Gardner and the Mona Lisa,and if not, then who?
“‘A slut,’ my roommate would say. ‘She’s doing a mouth striptease with her smile.’
“It’s true she’d fucking contaminated me with her smile. All I had to do was think of her crowned with light, her breasts raised and her arms open in a sweeping gesture inaugurating the glorious day, and a smile would spread over my beaming face, remaining between my lips like a sigh of the greatest beatitude. The guy who shared my room was a bad-tempered paranoiac with bipolar tendencies; it made him nervous that I never stopped thinking about her, all mischievous and generous, hence the smile. He didn’t like the idea of me smiling behind his back.
“Not so long ago, when I was nervous too, I felt that time spent doing nothing is blood you’re losing, blood leaving your body. My blood was over there, in the veins of that little nun. Little or big, I don’t know. That’s where life was. Behind the walls. Between four walls and in a bed, in the conversation she has with the world at the intersection of morning and eternity, a certain way of turning the courtyard of a convent on rue de la Santé into the Sahara of Charles de Foucault, and praying there without saying anything and without wasting her time. As for my time, my time for living or not, other people could spend it, think about it, put it to good use. My use of life had been disappointing, especially my own life I mean, I never really managed to live, but if you’ve tried yourself you know it isn’t easy, but I was beginning to hear, in the breathing of the tangible, invisible, and in a word discreet universe—quite unknown, like that Patuyan territory where Lord Jim carved out his fate—something livelier than life, the radar echo of infinitely gentle matter that might welcome me for a while. Things and people we look at stealthily—we steal something from them, as the root word shows, probably a bit of their image, as if we’re surveillance cameras, but why not benevolence cameras? We trust them to lead us, to walk us about, and they embody us, as if that fucking metempsychosis didn’t wait for us to die. We become the dog in the street, the tree waiting for its leaves, the baby bawling in its stroller, and the nun in her room who can’t see you but is probably praying for you, for you to be saved.
“I saved a greeting for her every morning, she would smile her smile, and it all fused together and remained hanging in the air.
“The first days at my window it was passionately sexual, I was lying in wait, feverish and predatory, a generous sperm donor, but what with habit and laziness and a whole lenitive chemistry, it turned into something else: murmuring a sweet song, not breaking crackers anymore, taming a titmouse, leaving the night nurses alone, giving a bit of oneself little by little, day after day—I moved all my hope into the nun’s place across the courtyard, making my nest in her flowerpots and my faith in her catechism, whereas my roommate slit his throat in the communal showers.
“I would not regret our conversations, not because he called me Monsieur Schmaltz or Sister Smiley, but because I had no idea what he was talking about. One day, before opening his mouth, he wrote out a draft of his declaration:
Unless seeing what never seen nor possible to know unimaginableto this day of which one would have to in orderto say other words than always the same ones and thustoday senseless and outdated tomorrow by audiovisualwithout a printer, I do not know what to say, Smiley—inFrench in the original.
“‘No,’ I would say. ‘You don’t always know what to say.’
“‘You don’t always say what you see either, because what you see is unspeakable, in French in the original, right? Schopenhauer can say that the true existence of man is what takes place inside