the corpse’s mottled flesh and wrinkled skin filled her with a sense of dread. Let one of the young men faint—she was certainly not going to do so and give them the excuse of her being a frail female to boot her out. Like gross anatomy, Jacques was a tough subject she was determined to master.
Their relationship continued in this manner for several years: between Jacques’ affairs with various young women he would return to Sala as a ship returns to its home port.
The Great War had, of course, ruptured his life. Jacques enlisted in the officer corps. He learned close-order drill, the attention which had to be paid to one’s uniform—clipping the errant thread that dangled from a buttonhole, polishing his boots—actually, his manservant did it for him—until they shone. And then the front lines, where he lived in what was more or less an open sewer.
Jacques spent only a few weeks in the trenches before being wounded in the leg, that injury of little long-run consequence save for the fact that it kept him in a military hospital and thereafter invalided, safe from greater harm. The pain from the wound had been terrible, but it had earned him shots of morphine. When he awoke in the field hospital twenty-odd kilometers from the front lines, he was a child again: the murmuring of the nurses melded into song, and the veils covering their hair made them seraphic. The smells of blood, camphor, and phenol reached him, as did the cries of men in pain—but on account of the morphine these did not arouse their customary associations. He babbled, as did the others around him.
When he had recovered sufficiently to be moved, he was sent to a glove factory remade into a rehabilitation hospital. The men who had lost limbs, noses, portions of jaws, the men whose lungs had been seared by mustard gas regarded Jacques with a mix of envy and contempt: he who would be left with nothing more than a scar, a preternaturally smooth and hairless expanse of skin. Having seen a living man blown to bits—up until the moment he had witnessed it, this turn of phrase had seemed just that, he could not have imagined that a man’s intestines could fly through the air in one direction, while his left leg hurled off in another—Jacques could no longer pretend to himself that he was still preparing for his life to begin. A sympathetic orderly brought him hastily-printed books, and he read poems which had been written at the front by poets now dead, the manuscript having been dispatched to the publisher by a grieving sister or fiancée. If he had died, he supposed it would have been Sala who would have sent a sheaf of his writings to a literary journal, with a note that read in part, “I wonder if you might look over these poems, which were returned to me along with the rest of his personal effects…” But as he had survived, he was not eligible for posthumous publication. The poems he himself mailed off were returned to him with brief notes expressing both admiration and regret, the latter outweighing the former.
He sank into a funk as the morphine was titrated down. He could bear the pain: he missed gazing at the world from a skewed perspective.
Shortly after he was discharged from the hospital, he saw a notice in the newspaper: the department of overseas affairs was seeking teachers for a variety of positions, including ones in Equatorial Guinea, Indochina, and Madagascar. It seemed a sign from the heavens.
The second full night he and Simone spent together at Joë’s house in Carcassonne, making love, sleeping, waking to talk, to make love again, Simone said, “Joë said”—tracing her finger through the tangle of dark hairs on his chest—“you were writing a book?” She was so fearful of making a gaffe, of earning Jacques’ contempt that she formed the next sentence in her mind and repeated it several times, daring herself to say it, as one gathers up one’s courage to jump into a frigid lake: “What’s it about?” How stupid that question, now that it is out of her.
(Later, Jacques will write: “Master of the word you speak/Slave of the word you have spoken.”)
Jacques will say, “Kupu-kupu terbang melintang / Terbang di laut di hujung karang,” and kiss her on the forehead.
“Oh, now I understand. Now it’s all perfectly clear to me.”
“Well, it’s a bit complicated—I’m writing about the time I spent in Madagascar, although not of the ‘colonial officer telling charming stories about the natives’ genre. Mostly, I suppose, it’s about hainteny, which is a form of oral poetry in Madagascar. The Merina people of Madagascar are probably of Malayan origin, and there are some similarities between the hainteny and the pantoum.”
Simone will be silent.
“You must forgive me. I can be a terrible pedant. Here I am in bed with a beautiful woman, discussing literary forms.”
“Oh, no, no. I’m interested. I’m fascinated by—in everything you have to say. It’s just—I didn’t get much of an education from the nuns. And then, when I was in Istanbul, I was trying to learn—for instance, to learn Turkish, and I did a little bit—but then—the pregnancy came, Marcel—and I was sent back here. I suppose it’s all a bit—scattershot—my education, my lack thereof. It’s so hard: having no one to guide me.”
“Well,” he will say, fondly, a bit pleased at delivering a lecture in bed—Sala would never have allowed such a thing—I have patients to see in the morning, I need my sleep!—“the basic form of a pantoum is that, after the first stanza, the first line of the next stanza repeats the second line of the previous stanza, and the third line repeats the fourth line.”
She could understand it better if she had a piece of paper and a pencil or if she could count on her fingers.
“It all sounds a bit ponderous when you put it that way, like double-entry bookkeeping. Are you familiar with Baudelaire’s—”
“Oh, Baudelaire! I’ve heard of him!”
Jacques will cough, “—with his Harmonie du soir?” And he’ll recite:
“Now is the time when trembling on its stem
Each flower fades away like incense;
Sounds and scents turn in the evening air;
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!
“Each flower fades away like incense;
The violin thrills like a tortured heart;
A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!
The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place.”
He will see she’ll be about to go into a rhapsody of delight over the poem, and want to warn her off—he won’t yet be ready to show her the full force of his disdain: “Myself, I’m not an acolyte of the cult of Baudelaire. I can do without the ‘melancholy waltzes’ and the ‘tortured hearts.’ I ally myself more with the Futurists: the factory gutter, the ditches filled with muddy water. But that is neither here nor there, is it, my darling?” He won’t really be that close to the Futurists, he’ll make that statement more as a way of shocking her.
“The notion of originality is a queer, even frightening thing to the Merina people. They repeat the proverbs as they have been handed down, because to do otherwise would be to dishonor the ancestors, who gave them this wisdom. And yet, when
