Quartet for the End of Time (58 page)

But nonetheless, someone else would put in, you must admit that the course of action you followed was the correct one. It is quite simple to discuss the actions and reactions that exceed or fall short of what we commonly understand as “reasonable” when the result is one that neither exceeds nor falls short but instead corresponds directly with the effect we would most desire. Your daughter was saved! Your instinct—
whatever exempted you from your rational senses—transferred to an action that you would (had you had all of your senses in order) have equally arranged. Therefore, it is impossible to discuss either question, whether or not you actually found yourself outside your senses at all, and whether or not instinct or impulse in a sane man can truly be considered separate from his reason, without verging into the metaphysical.

Perhaps we should ask the wife, someone else would interject.

Ask the wife what? the wife would say, turning from her conversation at the opposite end of the room.

A toast! someone else would cry.

To impulse over reason!

What's this? a hunchbacked physicist would ask, blowing his nose. A gathering of monkeys?

No! the botanist would cry. Simply an artists' convention!

With that, the conversation would invariably turn to the company's divergent assumptions about, and reactions to, contemporary art, which they felt it was their duty to keep abreast of. Breton's
Poèmes Objets
were a favorite topic, and Marcel Duchamp—who had recently returned quietly to the art world after ten years of playing chess, and from whom everyone was wondering what they could expect next. The company was divisively split on their reactions to the works of these artists, and many other things.

I can't quite see what it's all about, Monsieur Girard, a physicist, would say, for example, regarding Breton. I wouldn't be at all surprised if after a time we discover that it's all been a childish prank; that one way or the other, like usual, we've been
had.

Wait a minute, now—Monsieur Bernstein, the alienist, who had a great interest in matters of the subconscious, would say. How is one in a situation like this “had”?

Well, quite simply, Monsieur Girard would reply. If you buy a piece and go to the trouble of hanging it in your hall, and then it comes out later that the whole thing has been a complete joke—

But it is still seriously hanging in your hall, is it not? Bernstein would return seriously. Or even if not, even if it is only hanging there as a bit of
a joke you have with yourself, what separates the seriousness with which you take that little joke from the prank of the artist who mocks you?

Are you not referring—I'm sorry to interrupt—someone else (a young man, who had not yet made a name for himself in any field) would pipe in—you seem to be referring only to the
cultural
response of the work, and not the work itself. You are thus considering, if I am not mistaken, and as per our previous conversation, the
effect
of the work on the viewing public and the faddish response we seem now to so
encourage
in the arts—serious art being sadly relegated to the academy. Isn't what needs, the young man would continue, on the contrary, to be discussed, the veritable
cause
; just like any good science, isn't that—the serious pursuit of
a cause—
also the true purpose and function of art?

—

M
ARIE-
C
LAUDE HAD BEEN SO BRUTALLY BURNED BY HER CHILDHOOD
accident that, though in all other respects she recovered quickly, the skin of her lower left leg never healed. The first time Alden saw it—when, after months of serious attentions, she finally accompanied him to his little room on the Rue Auguste-Comte (once again on the seventh floor), and slowly, very slowly, he was permitted to undress her—he found the skin of this region of her body to be as smooth and raw and undeveloped as though it had never been touched. It was she who—before she permitted Alden to press on with the satisfactions of his own desires—lifted her skirt to reveal the damaged limb. As she did so, she looked neither at him nor at her own body, but toward the ceiling, as if in prayer. She hardly breathed in those moments. The muscles of her throat stood out, tense and distended, and Alden even thought he detected in the corners of her eyes two standing tears. They were not tears of sadness or selfpity, but instead of tremendous exertion—as the tears that might stand in one's eyes after being forced to hold a heavy object for a very long time, or strain in a singular direction against an opposing force. It was, that is, a purely physical strain Alden detected at that moment, and so it was with the attitude of one relieving another from a heavy physical
burden that he approached her. No, there was nothing tender in their initial contact as he knelt and began to touch the damaged regions of her body, at first tentatively, with the tips of his fingers. Indeed, the skin was so smooth there that it hardly appeared to be human flesh at all—or to have anything to do with human beings (just as François Grenadier had argued for his own part in rescuing his daughter from the flames). It seemed, if it were possible, to be hardly object, even.

All this was apparent to Alden as his hands touched that skin, then as he leaned in to place his lips upon it, not—at first—with the tenderness of a kiss, but instead in the way that a child might test the frozen metal of a pole with his tongue. Lured, that is, not by any sense of his own exemption from physical laws, and neither from danger, but by the purest curiosity. It was with this most innocent of human sentiments that Alden approached the damaged regions of Marie-Claude's body, and relieved her, at least for the short time he held the limb in his own hands, of a physical burden he had not, until that time, had any knowledge of. There was nothing between them in those moments but a pure and perfect physicality, and with what relief did they relent to it! The relief a machine must feel, say, as it falls, for the first time, into the regular rhythms for which it has been made.

After that, Marie-Claude and Alden could not be separated long. The period of time before they had encountered one another (when Marie-Claude was still only an atmospheric pressure as Alden circled closer toward her along the garden's outer path, and no contact was certain) became increasingly difficult to imagine. But, just as between two objects drawn together by a magnetic pull, it would have been impossible to express their relation at that earlier time in terms of desire—at least for one another. As tempting as it might be, that is, to attribute the pull by which two people are eventually drawn together as the cause of contact once it has been made, it simply cannot be so. It simply cannot be toward any one person, or object in itself (still as yet unimagined, unknown) that another is driven—but toward
desire itself.
It must be, therefore, that the realization of any desire in actual contact is made possible only by its continued impossibility. In many
ways, Marie-Claude and Alden maintained—even as they fell into the inevitable rhythms their contact produced—that impossibility. Even when Alden sensed beneath him all the muscles of Marie-Claude's body contract in a spasm of what he could only imagine to be the fullest contact between her body and his own, something remained between them: the physical objectness of their bodies, that greatest impossibility of all. Even, that is, as he sensed the pleasure of her body in his own, and as his own pleasure quickened and finally released itself, so that the two pleasures became—for a brief moment—one, he did not feel as though any contact had been made. It was as if he accompanied himself out to the furthest reach; that he was his own nerve standing erect at its outermost end—that final, inherent limit every body maintains in order, if nothing else, that it not absorb itself into other bodies and other things. He would cling to Marie-Claude's perfectly shaped shoulders, refusing even when she began to adjust herself beneath him (having realized, suddenly, that for some time now she had been arranged uncomfortably) to release her, and it was as though he were clinging not to her but to a body that had only referential value. It was not that he did not love her—it was just that something always remained between them that made it impossible for him to actually feel he was not merely clinging to the outer and extraneous regions of a body that would always remain to him unfamiliar and unknown.

Well, perhaps he did not love her. He believed he did, but it was difficult to be sure—not ever having had any particular confidence in the definition of the word, or any sense then or later of the correct and most accurate proportions of what it was he either felt or did not feel in proximity to Marie-Claude as they—spent—lay like stilled locomotives in each other's arms. As those arms became again what they had been all along: mere physical facts, disentangling themselves from the contact they had only, as if inadvertently, made.

I
T WAS NO ACCIDENT
, perhaps, that it was around this period of time, a few months after he met Marie-Claude (by now having abandoned
their garden strolls, they would ritually mount the seven flights of stairs every afternoon, instead, to Alden's narrow flat, Marie-Claude in the lead) that the pattern Alden had some time ago detected in the American newspapers took on for him an even more unmistakable form. At first it was gradual. As a developing photograph: the details emerging slowly against a background that remains (necessarily) blurred and grayed. As he continued to scan the news daily, circling the names of major political figures and sites of battles that had already occurred, hunting for clues—something shifted. Now it was not just certain words and phrases that stood out for him—whole images began to appear before him in sharp relief.

And yet still he was no closer to understanding why—or detecting in them any meaning.

It became even more difficult after this for Alden to conceal what he found in such a way that whatever it was might easily (by another; at a time and location he might always remain ignorant of) be reconstituted in its original form. Even from the beginning it had never been a simple matter of rearranging coded words according to a pattern that could be repeated exactly the same way every time. It would (Alden was quite sure—especially given the environment in which he worked, and his colleagues' very particular expertise) take only a quick glance at something like that to know that
something
was up— then only a few concentrated hours after that, at most, before anyone who cared to would know exactly what was. If, however, it was never suspected that the words Alden assembled were code at all, it followed that the code itself would be that much more difficult to break. It was for this reason he had first hit—back in the spring of '41—on the idea of creating out of the material he discovered a series of original “poems.” A decision he later had cause to regret—not only on account of how difficult each poem, in itself, was to achieve, but also on account of a further difficulty he hadn't even anticipated: for every poem he wrote he was additionally required to keep track of an appropriate “key.” (In order to appear as a
genuine poem
, and not merely garbled code on the page, it was, of course, essential that whatever he
wrote abide by a certain internal sense and logic, which could only continuously shift and change.)

As—two and a half years later—whole images began to appear to him, this process only became more complicated. He was now obliged to describe what he saw, but in such a way that whatever he described could
never be recognized—
except at the appropriate time and distance and with the appropriate key. It was Maurice Bonheur who (shortly after Alden met Marie-Claude, during that otherwise grim winter of 1944) inspired the idea he eventually settled upon: a system that would no longer rely on words at all.

Now, instead of scrambling the words or images he found, then “resurrecting” them according to a sense all their own, Alden began quite literally to dissect each word or image that he found piece by piece, until they did not resemble words or images at all but only a series of floating dashes and lines. These, too, required a key (they could only, of course, be reassembled according to an accompanying diagram) but, in all, it proved less complicated than his previous method, with less risk of betraying the work's true content and aim. Though Alden did not divulge to Maurice Bonheur the existence of these accompanying diagrams, or the actual origin of the words he disassembled on the page, the poet was nevertheless as enamored with the result—when, with modest pride, Alden showed a few of them to him—as he had been with his earlier efforts.

You have at last broken through! he exclaimed to Alden one afternoon when they met at their usual place on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The false barrier that has for so long existed between the visual and written arts!

Though Alden was bound to the initial shape of the coded letters and phrases his process would conceal, the possibilities for their rearrangement were, indeed, nearly limitless, and the process in itself extremely liberating. Alden could not help but draw the comparison in his own mind to when, at the age of eleven, he had first learned how to steal. This comparison—when later Alden shared it with him—positively delighted Maurice Bonheur. Truly, Alden told the poet, the feeling that flooded
through me then … it was—unrepeatable; but this came close. It was a feeling … but how can I describe it? Of absolute freedom—uncontainable joy. It happened, you see, almost completely by mistake: I simply failed to notice I still held the wrapped chocolate, which, with my very last penny, I had contemplated purchasing a moment before. Though I had decided against it—choosing to save the coin instead—I had neglected to replace the candy, and so still held it in hand as I approached the shop door. It was not too late! Not at all! I could have simply put the chocolate back in place on the counter where it belonged, or alternatively sought, in the depths of my pocket, that ultimate coin, and given it up. But I did neither. And it was that moment of brief but total awareness of the digression I had not yet but was just about to make, as I willfully closed my hand around the chocolate and walked out the door into the afternoon sun, that resulted in that pure, unrepeatable feeling of perfect freedom, and indescribable joy.