Those suburbs, on the other hand, no matter how ailing they might be themselves, became something like my healer. I needed them, urgently, imperatively. “Dull in the head” is for me the same as “ill.” And then there were times, in Paris, and even close to the edge of town, when I became so dull and ill that I wanted nothing but to get out. I felt at once locked in and locked out. The sounds, which my son, whom I otherwise believed unquestioningly, found quieter and more uniform than in small towns, hemmed me in, just as I experienced the absence of sound in the middle of the night as a sort of trap. Sometimes, on my
way out to the suburbs, I suddenly broke into a run, as if I were fleeing, all the while scolding myself angrily for not setting out much sooner, and spreading my arms wide, in all seriousness, once I got out there into the empty spaces. More than once tears even came to my eyes, as when a pain is cured all at once, or rather is transformed into something bearable, something sweet.
Thus I welcomed the widening circle of the suburbs: to the east, windy Ivry-sur-Seine, where more crimes occurred than just those that were always solved in the books of Simenon, which were often set there; to the west, Vanves, furrowed and difficult to take in; spreading up the mountainside, Chatillon with its scattering of buildings, from whose highest point in 1871 Prussian cannon had fired down on Paris, and occasionally even those towns with which nothing could be done and which, along with those responsible, deserved to be blown up. My greeting was silent, and at the same time somewhat resembled an exclamation, and it was directed at the three-dimensionality I had so greatly missed and had now found once more outside the gates, in the form of an apple crate, a dwarf palm, but also for instance the Eiffel Tower, which, discovered outside the city, suddenly appeared as astonishing as it probably is. And day after day, as I was walking through the suburbs, although I myself did not always know exactly where I was, I was trustingly asked by the many people lost there, especially in cars, for directions.
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made up my mind to live somewhere out there, for a time. I felt a powerful urge to experience the nights out there, and to expose myself to the nights. I thought it would not be forever, just as I pictured myself as married only temporarily, sort of playing at being a father, and also not writing forever.
So from people who wanted to go to Africa for a couple of years I rented a house in an area still unfamiliar to me. (Even today, when I consider myself knowledgeable about every corner of the
departement,
almost daily I find myself standing, to my surprise, in a completely foreign world, often simply because I have approached from a slightly different direction.) The house was still occupied by the owners, but how impatient
I was for them to get out and disappear to Senegal or wherever. Was that possible, for a person to be crazy about or infatuated with a place to live, and, what is more, with one that tended to reduce every one of my friends to monosyllabic responses when I rushed to show it to them, proudly, the minute the lease was signed?
One could also see the house, as one of my companions described it, as an “oversized stone grain bin, empty and gutted,” in a row with very similar lumps, roofed in tile, slate, or tin, with a sidewalk in front that barely had room for one person, yet snaked toward an infinitely distant misty vanishing point, of a color that another of my companions, barging along with me in the rain, called “oxblood red”âeven my child was alarmed by it, as I could feel through his handâon a street of the same color where every second car belonged to a driving school, no store and no bar to left or right, and all that in a suburb which, if anyone knew of its existence, stood for monotony and gloom, as witness the newspaper headline intended to spur people to take long trips to palm-lined beaches: “Oublier Clamart [forget Clamart].”
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remained infatuated with my future home; was burning to move in. The woman from Catalonia thought at first that I liked the place only because, as usual, I wanted the opposite of everyone else; I felt comfortable only in the role of the loner, the solitary understood by no one, wronged time and again even by those closest to him, with the whole world against him; for otherwise why, when I had it out with her, my wife, would I regularly berate her with the reproach “You all!”âeven more significant in Spanish:
“Vosotros,”
“You others”: “You others are ⦠,” “You others have ⦔?!
But I had no desire to position myself in contradiction to anyone else, to my surroundings, to my times; I was simply filled with enthusiasm, and then I managed to find the words to win over the woman from Catalonia (my son, on the other hand, merely seemed to obey, which for moments at a time undermined my certainty about the direction in which we were going). “Look how transparent the house is!” I said. “Through the front door and the windows overlooking the street the lawn behind the house shines through, with the apple tree there, under
which I shall dig up the ground next spring to make a little vegetable garden, so the blossoms will fall white on black.”
And in her presence I patted, tapped, and circled the plane trees of this suburb, which, standing there pretty much on their own, seemed like the advance guard of the plane forest in her native Gerona; I called her attention to the sounds from the nearby railroad station, which changed according to the type of wind, also to the vibrations of the trains shooting by, already at full speed, toward Brittany, toward the Atlantic; I pointed out the tip of the Eiffel Tower, which she would see from her room or study, through the chimney pots of the houses next door; I reminded her that our street was named after the philosopher of law Condorcet, perhaps the first proponent of equal rights for women, on whom she had written a paper; he had been arrested here while fleeing the radicals of the French Revolution; in my exhilaration I even lied to her that Joan Miró had painted in this very place for an entire summer and fall, up there where the forest began, in a hut belonging to the pea plantations that used to be typical of this place, the spot marked now by a footpath overgrown with blackberry brambles, and then I convinced myself, along with her, that Miró had actually been hard at work once behind the thorns and was still there today, a figure floating in the air.
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et on those first evenings in the house out in the suburb, outside the city walls, I was overcome by uneasiness, of the sort familiar to me from childhood when someone in the household was even a little late getting home.
So here I had similar fits, though everyone was there. I put away the owners' things or pushed them all into a corner, the African masks, for instance, turned on the lights in all the rooms as soon as dusk began to fall, was afraid to go down to the labyrinthine cellar (sent the woman from Catalonia and our five-year-old son on ahead; neither of them feared anything in the world), frenetically sawed up firewood, far more than we needed, in the farthest corner of the backyard, and on those mild September evenings built a fire in the fireplace; while my wife sat by the fire for hours, gazing into it in silence, her eyes glowing, I grew weary and irritable at the flames I myself had lit and could not bear her and
my hypnotized idleness. This sense of desolation accompanying new beginnings is part of me and is also necessary.
And one morning, after another night of being utterly petrified, I pushed open a window and found myself, and us, as in a fairy tale, in precisely the place I had wished for. The hostile zone had dissolved in the early-morning air. Now I lived there, and the living was mysterious, as it was supposed to be. And that was to remain the case for a time. What does “for a time” mean? For a continuation, for a moving forward, for a staying in place.
How comforting and strengthening these fairy-tale-life moments were. From them I learned what freedom was, as on that first day after the eight years of boarding school, except that this time it was immensely more powerful, under the shoulders (a word that in French seems to be derived from the word for wings), in the nostrils, in the fingers, under the soles of the feet. I had time. Go. Up. Out. Do it.
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very step in that house in the suburb seemed to be that sort of doing or shaping. Whether I was going shopping, taking Valentin to the local school, or hanging around the house: I was doing something, simply by being present in the region day and night. I kept seeking out different ways of getting places, observed, differentiated, compared: the bread in the various bakeries, the gardens, at that time, two decades ago, more vegetable than flower gardens, the cafés, supermarkets, and shoe-repair shops in the upper and lower suburb.
I read histories of the place and acquired a geological survey map of the regionâI had to go to the national institute in Paris for itâso as to have firmly in mind the base, layer upon layer, on which I was moving around.
I found particularly appealing the houses, almost without exception unstuccoed, especially in the lower town, built of the local sandstone, most of it obtained at the beginning of the century from underground quarries, which, long since abandoned, invisibly pock the landscape; half a century later, a new high-rise building collapsed into such a cavern, which the builders had not wanted to think about; the collapse caused as many deaths as an earthquake, and since that time anyone who buys a house in the affected area receives a certificate: no mine shaft below;
the ground at this location is solid. I concentrated on the façades, which were laid course upon course out of these unequally sized stones, so obviously extracted from the local soil, each in its apparently accidental form and yet all of them fitting together so perfectly; in this way I honed my ability to perceive color, sometimes calling on my son for help with characterizing the shadings.
The blocks, and also blocklets as small as a child's fist, were a light gray, in which you could see on closer inspection a tinge of yellow, as if from clay, shot through with darker veins, which with time could go slate blue or moss green, also glassy bulges, unexpectedly sparkling in all colors, ranging to coal black, also pure white grains, such as you find in the sand of a brook, the size of ant eggs, and like them oval.
As a result of the prominent yellow, all these façades could give an appearance of sunshine, even on a rainy morning, a very odd sunshine, coming up from below, which is otherwise a peculiarity of clay landscapes, deserts, badlands. (The woman from Catalonia, on the other hand, felt mocked by this phenomenon: for what stretched before one out in nature in the similarly colored familiar Spanish
meseta
here flickered before her as a structure.) The closer I came to the stones in the suburban house, often bumping them with my nose, and examined them, the more I had an entire planet within my grasp, embodied in this one thing, as once before, very long ago in childhood, the sight of a drop of rain in a yellow-brown-gray-white bit of dust on the path had made the world open up to me for the first time. And it was not some strange planet but here, the earth, and one that was peaceful through and through.
In similar fashion a crater now opened up in the building stone, fresh for the touching with the tip of a finger; ridges formed, and the observer, moving above this scene at barely an eyelash's distance, was showered with a sense of shelteredness brought on by the barely perceptible crumbling of the tiny weathered bits, which recalled the strangely meaningful glow along the eroded edges of the sunken roads back home.
Another feature of this world in miniature was that when you looked closely it turned out to be inhabited, if only by a tiny creature, the size of a pinhead, dangling here on a thread from a cliff, and a shimmering something like a one-celled animal on the opposite slope, beyond the seven mountain ranges, the two of them reminiscent of Robinson and Friday.
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ll my life the unapproachability of the world, its incomprehensibility and its inaccessibility, my exclusion from it, has been terribly painful to me. That has been my fundamental problem. Belonging, participating, being involved was so rare that each time it became a great occasion for me, worthy of being recorded. Every time the world, the peaceable one, became a world, nature's and civilization's bending, extending, taking on color, was not only an event but a moment of recognition: with this recognition there would be no war.
There, during my first stay in the suburban region, at the midpoint of my life, for a good two years, such events fell into my lap almost constantly, on some days there for the plucking every other moment like the cherries in the treetop in Arcueil. The planet took on shape and became good to the touch. During that period it seemed erotic.
That applied also to eating, which began, along with the walk, drawn out as much as possible, to the restaurant, together with its spaces and vistas, to awaken a barely discovered pleasure (though immediately attenuated when the dinner table was not located in my new region). And of course I had drunk previously, primarily to be a part of thingsâsee aboveâbut it was here that I first realized what it meant for wine to be delicious. I often withdrew to the most remote corner of the house with a glass, after midnight, turned out the light, took a sip in the pitch darkness, and then, when I could feel the first sip actually rising to the tips of my hair, another.