Yes, from a distance I was unserious, and at the same time hardened
toward my friends. And at the side of my son, too, toward whom I outwardly seemed so attentive and patient, I quite often caught myself merely feigning interest. Certainly I listened to him, but I had no heart for the child. Did that not become clear from the fact that I would forget him if he was away for more than a couple of days? Why did all the world treat me in his absence as a single person, someone without attachments who could be enlisted for the craziest adventures?
If I seem to be making myself out as worse than I was at the time, my intention is not to ask to be refuted but rather to have something to tell. Can it be that this was the only way for me to get started? When I was in boarding school, crammed in like a sardine with the others at Mass, didn't I invent sins or upgrade venial failings to atrocities so I could slip away to the confessional in back, from which I would emerge energized and proud of my stories?
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ut then I did become more closely acquainted with someone in the region: the later petty prophet of Porchefontaine.
At the time he was proprietor and chef of the restaurant in the hollow of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, by the clearing in the middle of the woods, as now at a restaurant by the railroad embankment in the suburb of Versailles: since then both of us have moved our base of operations two valleys to the west in the Seine hills, and each of us still finds himself at about the same distance from the other. Between our houses there is a similar set of foothills to cross.
In that period in my lireâwhich, for all my idleness, was a time of preparationâhe became for me something that meant more than friends: an adversary whose acumen awakened my own; a misanthrope on whose rationality I honed the substance of my illusions; a tester in the face of whose deliberate heartlessness my own heart opened up as if in the presence of a secret.
The entire person attracted me as just such a secret. He was as he was; in contrast to me, he did not merely feign disgust and distaste; and yet that could not be all there was.
Even though he was my double as no one had ever been before, and finally the one I welcomed, there had been a time when he had made entirely different choices. At moments I was convinced my thoughts
mirrored his exactly, yet when I articulated them, the tone was wrong. Only when they came from his mouth did they sound authentic. Again unlike me, he stood by his condemnation of the world. No, he was not my mirror. And at the same time, when I was by myself, I experiencedâa word that otherwise only my friend the priest can use without embarrassmentâlonging for him; likewise for his place.
The stone cabin there on the edge of the clearing, long since gone without a trace, is still for me the most charming tavern on earth, the epitome of an inn. The first time I approached it, after a two-highway, three-secondary-road, four-forest route, I took it for a snack bar, or, with the ponds nearby, a fishermen's pub. But then there was a door, of glass, with a lace curtain; and the Egyptian standing outside, seemingly moving in his motionlessness, like a dancer, in combination with his black suit and white shirt, transformed the barrack, and my long journey there contributed to the impression, into a caravansary.
Its proprietor did not, to be sure, return my greeting, and I had to go around him to enter, and same with a Doberman that unexpectedly, soundlessly, rose from the threshold on long, gangly legs. The dining room, one step beyond, was bathed in green from the forest outside all its windows. The few tables stood well apart from each other, with light tablecloths and napkins artfully swirled in the glasses, in which candle flames were mirrored, although guests were sitting only in a corner in back (in any other restaurant they would have been given a table by the window, also to make it look inviting to passersby).
I stood for a while, and when no one came, I picked a table. I waited patiently. No matter what happened now, I knew I was in the right place for a meal. If not today, I would eat here another time, and then again and again. Unlike in other nice places, I felt no immediate urge to ascertain the particulars. I simply waited, deaf to the conversation at the table behind me, tired from my long walk and happy.
The
patron
appeared, the man with the Egyptian profile, coming now through the swinging door from the kitchen, and wordlessly set before me bread, wine, water, and olives with stems, and had no sooner given the bread basket another turn toward me than he was already out of the small room. The bread was warm, saffron yellow when broken open, with a fragrance of the Orient that went with the pattern of the dishes. The courses that followed, likewise presented in silence and without my
having ordered them, on ordinary plates, were classic French cuisine, and yet they seemed different by a degree. There was something more to them; later I noticed that, on the contrary, this effect actually came from something's being left out. Besides, each dish, served by the chef, the proprietor, was sliced and arranged in a way that brought to mind the story of a Chinese butcher: this butcher had learned how to carve in such a way that in faithfully adhering to the original shape he created entirely new shapes.
Thus it was as if I found myself sitting down to a meal that would have been equally suited to the Mongolian steppe or to a salmon river in Alaska, and as if I were also that far away, out in the open. I had not been particularly hungry. But even before the first bite it occurred to me, just at the sight of the modest dish, simply presented in the right light on the scratched cafeteria plate, that something had been missing up to now. Why else should I heave such a great sigh of relief? Why else should I have to keep such a tight grip on myself so as not to cry? Did this mean I had been miserable all this time, and had not realized it until this moment of nourishment?
Then the proprietor's voice made itself heard. He admonished the guests behind me, whose clothing hardly differed from his, to laugh less vulgarly, also to speak more softly, and about something other than food, wine, politics, business, and winning games, for instance about the eclipse of the moon last night or the biography of Pythagoras, which he strongly recommended for the way of life it depicted.
The group seemed accustomed to hearing such things from him and hardly paid him any heed. Nor did it bother them apparently that he then remained standing by their table, arms crossed, as if to speed their departure from his place, and, while they were still making their way to the door, was in a hurry to set the table while still clearing it, to eliminate every trace of them.
And no sooner were they outside than he laced into them, as if talking to himself: They were like everyone nowadays, synthetic human beings, placed in the world to wreak havoc and cause commotion; conceived without love; instead of being born innocent from a mother's body, extruded somewhere, ready for use and for molding; their youth devoted to sharpening murder weapons; their maturity, behind their human masks, an endless massacre; and in the end they would just splinter,
unseen and unheard, canceled out, wiped off the radar screen, neutralized.
I only half listened, not knowing whether I should take this seriously; objected, feeling it was my duty, that an innkeeper was there for everyone and should keep his opinions to himself. I did not allow myself to be deflected from my enjoyment of the meal, my delight in this out-of-the-way spot, and I thanked the chef and proprietor for it. Without looking at me, he said that it was not for the sake of me, the chance guest, that he had served up this meal, but rather to pay homage to the good things to eat and to celebrate the day as it came. And after he had poured me mint tea, in a high arc from an oriental-style onion-shaped pot, I had no sooner stood up than he slapped the seat of my chair with a thick waiter's towel, as he had done with the others while they, too, were still there.
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fter that I stopped in there regularly, also because of the view.
It was as if the dining room had neither walls nor a roof, and as if outside, amid the heavy foliage of the mammoth oaks, dots of the sky shone like bluing onto the set table, and as if the clay path under the trees were the picture into which not the painter entered, but his people, and without disappearing into it.
Once, when a light rain was falling, the patron barked at me that I should go out onto the terrace; because of the trees I would not get wet, and besides, looking and listening, in combination with his dishes, slowed down one's breathing and kept one warm.
And in fact his inn in the hollow seemed an oasis of summer far into the autumn; as one came up the path, a curiously dry air crackled through the oak leaves, now riddled with holes, which apparently dropped only in the middle distance.
Since in the meantime the proprietor had offended his usual guests for good, and the most recent edition of the restaurant guide now warned people about his gruff manner, there were only a few of us left. Yet even if the place had been packed, running at full steamâwhich I sometimes wished forâthe experience would always have been the same for me there.
The sound of the trees in the clearing, a seething, swelling, blazing, made me understand why one of the auditory ossicles is called the “stirrup.”
I felt something tugging at me; gratitude galvanized me, followed by an exuberance that wanted to go somewhere and then nowhere at all: I was there, and I was innocent.
And one day the proprietor stood next to me and said, his hand on the back of my chair: “Sometimes when it gets quiet in the clearing, a fist seizes me by the scruff of my neck from above and hoists me off the ground like Habakkuk in your Bible, one of the minor prophets. I, on the other hand, am the petty prophet, and insist on that.”
From then on we no longer dealt with each other as host and guest. From time to time he sent me handwritten invitations to his place, with descriptions of dishes and wines. Or, when I could not get away, for instance because my son was sick, the restaurateur from the clearing would come to my house, in the evening, on his (very flexible) days off, bringing his pots and pans, and would cook and serve a meal. He would lock himself into the kitchen, and except for faint Arabic music we would hear not a sound from him, and he always took a very long time. Afterward we would play chess in silenceâsomething he nowadays always invites me in vain to doâhe with grim intensity, I casually, while inside us, it seemed to me, it was often actually the other way around. He was a stern winner and a laughing loser.
I admired him for his implacability, just as I was annoyed with myself for my readiness to relent after an initial burst of rage. To this day I have not fathomed his secret. And I always feel a kind of uncertainty toward him, going back to our very first shared moment, or perhaps the opposite thereof, that time at the door to his caravan stopping place.
And soon he had to move, after going bankrupt, to another cabin, beyond the next knoll of the Seine hills, by the upper pond in Villebon. And where this second little restaurant stood, there now grows, like the grass on the site of the first, a tangle of stinging nettles and wild blackberries. From its windows I could see the wind rippling the water down below, just as now, in his third place in Versailles-Porchefontaine, I can see on the embankment the long-distance and local trains speeding and rolling by, overlapping and blocking the view of one another.
Sometimes I set out for there for dinner, taking a roundabout route through the forest, and each time get up disappointed, without having had any complaint with the food or the table by the window. For sitting, resting, meals, pursuing my thoughts, I am constantly on the lookout
for an inn like the one at Fontaine Ste.-Marie. And I do not intend to stop looking. Perhaps my friends on their various journeys will tell me about finding one.
But as for the clearing, with the bulldozed terrace area, I now avoid itâlike all clearings, by the way. It seems to me that nothing more can grow there: as if today's clearings, even including the jungle of the Yucatán, belonged to the runners, gymnasts, fitness freaks, dogs, bombing squadrons, and poisonous mushrooms. All the entrances to them could be called, like the one here in the bay, “Allée de la Fausse Porte,” the avenue of the wrong door.
And at the same time I think at least once a day of my inn in the clearing: what a lovely, eternal, simple sitting one could have there. All the things that had been studied and understood the night before forgotten, and yet close at hand. The breath of wind moves the space between one's fingersâa snapping. Reminiscent: only this word for it comes to mind, an introductory word that calls for a noun, in the genitive, the generative case. Reminiscent of what?
And of course there was no staying there (although the solitary proprietor had his room over the kitchen, as if for the long haul).
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hose were the years when, without working, I was riding high as never before and hardly ever afterward, and at the same time feeling more threatened and on borrowed time than ever.
Each time I went to bed after midnight, I had the distinct impression of having survived another day, and I actually painted the date of the new day, the only thing I entered in my notebook at that time. I understood the complaints of various involuntary (unlike me) residents of the suburbs, who saw themselves cut off there from the world as it flowed by, consigned for a time to an evacuation or pre-death zoneâparticularly on certain evenings when, beyond the gates of the metropolis, an un-contoured brightness settled over the streets, on which the newly leafed-out trees shriveled into wilted cemetery plants, and far and wide a queasy silence reigned, the window shutters closed tight on every side, abrupt chirping of sparrows, the wail of car alarms, and the barking of watchdogs.