Sphinx (3 page)

I spent the night drifting from port to port. While waiting for Tiff, I wallowed in seedy dressing rooms which were in reality mere landings between two flights of stairs, blocked off with battered chairs and cardboard boxes surrounded by bottles of fizzled-out sparkling wine under the gray of a flaking ceiling. I observed the hellish comings and goings of strippers dashing around, dressing, undressing, touching up their makeup, fixing their outfits, and spraying perfume; I gazed at myself distractedly in a mirror imprinted with lipstick and etched with clumsy letters. The wheezing of the ceiling fan, the rumble from the nearby stage, the sight of the red velvet sofa covered in holes, burned through by cigarettes, and the feeling of exile between blue walls defiled with the imprints of dirty hands brought me all the closer to that single, splenetic feeling so difficult to define: melancholia. I relished it to the point of drunkenness. In this refuge, a haven of ennui, I could give myself up freely to a vision of bodies shiny with sweat, stranded and exposed under the blind eye of the spotlight, infected by the dampness and stuffy stench of a mob crouching in the shadows of the stage. And here I found what I had come looking for: before my eyes, a sweltering, vitrified clash of light and flesh in the swaying red darkness.

The Black-Jack and the Tahiti had closed two days before after a raid by the vice squad. That left us around forty-five minutes of free time. Our next stop was at the Ambigu, one of the last remaining cabarets of the golden age of Montparnasse. We crossed over the Seine by Pont Neuf. Tiff drove too fast for me to enjoy the ride; I was in the grips of
an excited trembling from this race through the almost-empty streets of Paris—from the speed, the solemn desertedness of the city, the violent contrast between the lights and their shadows.

A small roadblock in a little street perpendicular to the banks forced us to slow down, and I recognized the entrance to the Eden, still lit up, as we passed. Tiff, noticing my lingering gaze, suggested we go in to have a drink and see some friends. I was in such a rush getting out of the car that she had a hard time keeping up with me in her high heels. Once inside, we said some hurried hellos to the host, the cashier, and the coat checker, and then Tiff led me toward the wings of the stage. The neon dazzled me right away. In front of the mirrors was a row of half-naked women taking off their makeup. I barely had time to observe them before Tiff was dragging me along with her through a maze of doors and stairs toward the dressing rooms of the lead dancers. At the end of the corridor we crossed paths with someone I would come to know later as A***, who, head shaved, was now coming out of the dressing room to perform the finale: the descent down a big staircase lined with a teeming wall of black and white feathers. The show was drawing to a close. The dressing rooms were abuzz with assistants gathering costumes and dancers hurriedly removing their makeup. Tiff introduced me to one of the leads, also one of her old acrobatic partners. Strangely enough, some of these people recognized me from the Apocryphe or some other club where they would go dancing for their own enjoyment once the show was over.

We had just enough time to exchange a number of hellos and to have a drink before leaving again for the eighth cabaret of the night. The visit to the Eden was a brief respite in this race that made up a typical night for Tiff. I had been in so many cabarets that they all started to look the same by five in the morning: a sweaty inferno, a bombardment of lighting alternatively seedy and brash, a night striped with so many lights that
there was neither dusk nor dawn.

By the end of her treks, Tiff always found herself with feet bruised from high-heeled shoes and back aching from lugging her bags of stage costumes from her car to her dismal dressing rooms. Always in a rush, Tiff would grab the reward for her performance on the way out (between twenty and sixty francs depending on the quality of the establishment).

She dropped me off at my door. As I leaned in to say goodnight, her perfume caught my attention. What was it called again, and what did it remind me of? The question nagged at me for a long time before I managed to fall asleep. The next evening, on the way home from buying vinyl records for the Apocryphe, I passed in front of the Guerlain boutique on the Champs-Elysées and the name abruptly came back to me: Parure.

The Eden held a certain power over me; I was helpless against it. Before I went to work at night, I would spend two hours there, from ten to midnight. The troupe very quickly adopted me: they asked for my opinion on their makeup and confessed to me all their little dramas. I liked to let myself be brushed by naked skin, by boas and feather fans. I liked to watch as a face transformed under the stroke of a pencil and the touch of a brush, the line of a drawn eyebrow, the shape of an accentuated cheekbone. This living exhibition turned me off of antiquities; the odors of perfume and sweat were missing at all the museums I visited.

Out of all the dancers, A*** showed the most enthusiastic fondness toward me. Our relationship was very ceremonious at first. I would follow A*** into the dressing room, often bringing along a token of my affection: flowers; a photograph taken surreptitiously as A*** entered onto the stage; a fashion etching from the 1930s. My attempt at courtship was like something out of a book from the 19
^th
century.

After the kiss on the lips that everyone there was rewarded with upon arrival, I would listen to the details of A***'s day. I would settle deep into the red velvet couch in the dressing room, stretching my legs over the armrest, and silently contemplate the slow process of applying makeup and arranging a costume. I noticed ironically that the dancers spent more time adjusting these little delicate nothings that elude nudity than one would dressing oneself from head to toe for a gala at the Opéra.
There are a thousand details to consider when putting on a simple g-string that never even cross the mind of the socialite pulling on her long gown or the man fastening a bow tie on the wing collar of his shirt. A thousand details in order to show off a behind, leaving the thighs and hips free and visible, but without revealing the crotch. I was amazed at the time it took for a body always to appear smooth, hairless, supple, and flawless: in a word, angelic. I learned that black skin like A***'s demands makeup of a completely different hue and variety than white skin. I learned how fragile the body is, how much care is required to maintain the suppleness of the limbs and joints. Before leaving the dressing room, A*** always performed a few dance steps for my selfish pleasure; then we would separate. The last image I had before going to work was of the shimmering golden reflections on skin lit up by dim hallways lights and soon devoured by the shadows of the wings. I would linger for a few moments in the dressing room, contemplating all the tools of metamorphosis, the street clothes lying around. Often I would dreamily put back an object that had fallen on the floor, or leave a little note slipped between the mirror and its frame. It wasn't the show that brought me to the Eden; I would hurry toward the exit while the audience applauded the opening, sitting with their champagne. Once outside, I would make my way on foot to the Apocryphe, progressively sobering up over the fifteen-minute walk that I always took, regardless of the weather or the season.

The Apocryphe! Dark nights light up with red. Somewhere between brothel and butcher shop, its ambiguous essence was never revealed except to those who knew how to decipher mirrors' reflections. One had to guess at everything, trying to grasp words on lips, fugitive gestures, events captured in the mirror, while pretending to stare at oneself. A macabre masked ball, people tripping over streamers that snaked down from the
ceiling and coiled around the supporting pillars. To distill music, to set bodies in rhythm, was to be the priest of a harrowing cult. Once I realized that, all I could do was drift, asking myself why I was there, besides the chance that had brought me and the poisonous ease that had ensnared me. Then again, why leave? It was so easy to think of this crossing over as a trial of purification through the mud. I would have had to pretend to look all over again for some kind of calling, knowing full well that there was nothing to find, and that it would all end in horror and silence.

The moment I started there coincided with my decision to abandon what could have been an honest intellectual career. I had wasted four or five years on the benches of my school's theology department. Had I really imagined entering into a religious practice? I was about to launch into a thesis when, for some strange reason, a profound refusal began to bubble up in me. Not a refusal of faith or of metaphysics, but of the inanity of the scholarly discourse the university required me to use. The incomprehension of my fellow students, their constant tendency to relate every idea to some troubling personal decision and thus to consider the slightest original thought as the expression of an individual vice, only added to my melancholy and disgust. I was put on trial for everything I said, and so I adopted a seemingly contemptuous silence. I deserted my courses and avoided the cafés where the new inquisitors gathered and instead took refuge at my house, reading the books left behind long ago in the apartment my grandmother had bequeathed to me. For six months, from October to March, I succumbed to my natural tendency for reclusion, living between my bed and my desk.

I avoided going to the university as much as possible; the idea horrified me. But I went to the lectures on the Incarnation given on certain Thursdays by Padre***, a Spanish Jesuit. One day as I was leaving his class, he called me over, suggesting we have dinner together. The invitation
was so casual, even bordering on nonchalant, that it seemed only natural to accept. Padre*** practiced his faith in the strictest orthodoxy, though some people accused him of violating its core commandments in his private life. Apparently he didn't flee from worldly activities with sufficient horror. Because he wrote a column on culture for one of the larger evening newspapers and was the cofounder of a gastronomic circle, the students considered him a scandalous hypocrite, a deviant of decadent habits, which, I confess, made him pretty interesting to me. And so without hesitating I accepted his invitation for the next day.

Over dinner we vaguely alluded to the path it seemed I was about to quit. I think he understood my reasons for defecting and approved of them, but didn't want to admit it. When I entered into the world of theology, I had aroused hope in many of the priests and professors, due as much to my own intellectual merit as to the overall intellectual weakness of the sons and daughters of well-established families who had devoted themselves to these studies. I inexplicably wasn't living up to their hope that if I didn't take the vow I would at least become a respectable doctor in theology who might bring back a bit of luster to the discipline, devalued as it was by the mediocrity of its traditional followers; the Church pines for these lights of Reason as much as it fears them. Young Catholics born, raised, and nurtured in the accepted family faith tend to lack audacity. Restricted by tight-laced morals, they retreat from thought as soon as a question comes beating too furiously against the flanks of their fortified certitudes. Doomed to inbreeding according to hallowed rituals, they shrink from all secular currents that aren't weighed down by dogmas. The young girls, sensible and stupid, reserving their virginity for their husbands; the young men of old France, equally timid and crude under the contradictory effect of a suppressed sensuality that finds its outlet in military endeavors or during religious charity trips.
Most of the participants of these theological cycles replaced intelligence and pertinence with narrow-minded diligence and a stubborn naïveté that nothing could disarm. The result was a sanctimonious flock that couldn't countenance the idea that the purpose of philosophy was not to posit an unequivocal certitude, crying out body and soul to designate the “good” philosophy and condemn in turn the “bad.” They all congregated in the class of a theologian from Freiburg who specialized in this type of anathema. He stoked their base passions and exorcised their terrors. I attended his first class. He was determined to separate the proper from the improper in the ideas of our era. In the space of an hour, he derided all that had left its mark on the culture over the past two centuries. The audience was delighted at having within their grasp the arguments of someone in a position of authority, which had hitherto been cruelly lacking in their struggle against the materialists, dialecticians, analysts, and other genealogists. I never set foot in his class again after a heated discussion in which he placed all of his opponents—myself among them—at the mercy of his devout followers. They formed a cabal: they spoke of killing the black sheep; of the Freemasonry of relapsed Jews; of communists bankrolled by speculative German thought; of libidinal intellectuals conceived on the divans of cosmopolitanism. The lack of decorum in the debate, as much his archaic behavior, distressed me immeasurably. In the face of this crowd of imbeciles that prided itself on the title of “the Lord's flock,” I was deciding whether to resort to violence or haughty resignation. I prayed ironically for this flock to transform into a blazing spit roast, or at least for the arrival of a blistering epidemic of brucellosis, neither of which ever came about.