Sphinx (15 page)

I hung up. I was cold—from lack of sleep, from the wet clothes I still had on, from the idea of this cold city. In the darkness, in my drowsiness, I sensed death in the air. I turned on the light and undressed; my gestures were slow, clumsy; it felt as if I were never going to be able to change into dry clothes. In the elevator I lit a cigarette, which made my head spin. In the mirror I was frightened by how pale I was. I thought I saw death on my face, in my eyes. How did that occur to me? There exists no image of death. I surprised myself, I suppose, by thinking, by knowing, or by understanding—I don't know which—that death lived inside of me, that death had come up to the surface in my sleep to take possession of my carnal covering, to put it on and to cover me in turn with its cast-off rag.

The night porter called me a taxi. I went down the same road I had taken a few hours earlier in reverse. I wasn't looking at the streets; I was trying to glimpse the reflection of my face in the glass that separated me from the driver, but it was too dirty and murky. My watch read ten o'clock, the time in Paris; I switched it to the time in New York. The sight of the hospital overwhelmed me. I lost myself in the hallways cluttered with beds. Cops were bringing in the hobos they had picked up in the street on stretchers; here and there were odors of sweat, vomit, urine, and disinfectant. The plastic double doors closed, swishing behind me. I hadn't run but I was out of breath. I sat for a moment between two chatting security guards before recommencing my haphazard route.
Was I dreaming? Deserted hallways followed cluttered corridors; it seemed as if I had crossed dozens of identical gazes, the empty stares of the New York night flotsam, and my own gaze was probably no different. A sign finally pointed me in the right direction. In a corridor identical to all the others, I spotted the night nurse in the middle of injecting a sedative into a woman who was babbling deliriously, pouring out an abstruse flood of Hispanic sounds. The young girl at her side was sobbing and wringing her hands, the tears hideously disfiguring her and revealing decayed incisors in her contorted mouth. When the nurse had finished, I approached her and she brought me to the room. The doctor was near the bed, speaking to the presiding nurse. They had placed an oxygen mask on the old woman's face. She had suffered a drop in blood pressure; as if there were nothing else to be done except wait for an unlikely miracle, the doctor withdrew. There was suddenly no one else in the room except for me and this body, whose breathing and failing heart depended on the machines. She didn't see me, probably didn't hear me either. With terror I drew my hand near hers, which remained inert. I leaned over her, observing her face. I spoke to her.

This dying woman was a painful reminder of her child. I pronounced the name of my beloved. An identical absence. And now, she was dying. Had she waited for me to come, for someone to come, before surrendering to her exhaustion with living? She had probably waited, with all her strength, for a voice to come and appease her long-lived solitude. What if she had died from despair, from the atrocious despair at having awaited a voice that never came? What if she had died in her bed, in this infernal hallway, always listening for the sound of a familiar footstep; amidst the noise, the deranged cries, the echoes of conversations, brushed by a thousand bodies, all foreign and indifferent. I kissed her forehead, wiped off the sweat, and thought about how on my dying day there
probably wouldn't be anyone to do the same for me. I straightened up and lingered in silence, taking note of all the noises surrounding us, the beeps of the machines connected to her, the imperturbable rhythm of belabored breathing, the gaps of electronic silence…I went out into the hallway and asked the night guard for a coffee. I came back into the room and sat on the chair I had moved next to the bed. I held this old momma's dark-skinned hand in mine. I felt life beating savagely, shamefully within me; my heart resounded in its ribcage; my muscles, though spent by fatigue, played and moved in physical impatience. Life can be handed down, but not handed over, I thought to myself. The nurse entered and remained a moment in my company. I kept quiet while she talked to me about a number of things. She mentioned that her colleague had told her a bit about me. I told her my story, why I was there. I was speaking to her in a deep, hoarse voice without looking at her, caressing this hand I was clinging to lovingly. The nurse left soon after. I lingered in the penumbra, the only light coming from a lamp at the head of the bed. I was not at all aware of time's passing; my sole link to the world was the hand I was holding. I was looking at this face, searching for something of A***'s in it.

My rumination was interrupted by a sound. I turned my head but could not identify the source. Suddenly I understood that the noise was nothing but a sudden silence: the heart monitor had stopped beeping and a green, flat line passed continuously on the screen—the machine displayed a zero. I squeezed her hand in mine; I knew she was dead. Oxygen continued to flow, now useless. I called the nurse and the doctor. The doctor recorded the time of death, came back toward me and announced that it was all over. He asked me if I could take it upon myself to notify the family members, if there were any. And in the same tone, without transition, he asked me if I consented to an autopsy. Looking at the corpse, I was submerged in a kind of disgust at the abrupt resurgence of raw,
cannibalistic reality. I responded without diverting my gaze that I judged autopsies to be barbaric and moreover of little scientific use, since they never yielded any new discoveries. I entreated him to excuse my refusal and thanked him for his care.

The nurse went about disconnecting all the machines hooked up to this body they had failed to keep alive. She explained to me what came next: declaration of death, retrieval of the deceased's personal effects from the hospital safe. I had to wait another two hours before the administrative services opened. I sat back down beside the cadaver. All my thoughts during those two hours of vigil were muddled and kept getting away from me; I felt nothing but an invasive inner turmoil, a mute silence without the succor of meditation. At eight o'clock I went down to the office to take care of the formalities. They gave me the clothes, the watch, and the bag that had belonged to the deceased. I inquired about a funeral home and they told me of one not far from the hospital. I went back into the room one last time. The waiting rooms were filling back up with patients. My body was cutting through the crowd, as if acting on its own; my soul seemed to be missing from it. The nurse on duty approached me to offer her condolences. I told her I would return the next day to settle the details of the burial.

The weight of it all, the heaviness and difficulty of the preparations, fell onto my shoulders. It had stopped raining, the sky had cleared, I saw the sun and upon leaving the hospital I felt the New York air, impalpable, enveloping me. I crossed the avenue, running, without seeing anything. I kept running all the way down the street to the building where the deceased had lived. It was a building with twenty floors, very close to the hospital. Closing the door of the studio behind me, I found myself again in the room that, since Paris, had been haunting me in a vision. It hadn't changed a bit, still a concretized shell of solitude where she had lived for
years, neglecting her soul. I sat in the armchair, under her portrait done after the war. A*** had lived there too, before fleeing to Europe; in the closet were A***'s old schoolbooks and records. In a drawer of the desk against the wall I found a number of photographs and some letters A*** had written long ago. What was I supposed to do with all of this now?

I took care of all the practical details, notified the family, paid the priest and the undertaker. She was buried in a cemetery in north Harlem. Some of the family came to the funeral. I asked those whom I had met during my trips to New York with A***—the old mommas in tears, her sisters—to come by the apartment of the deceased to take anything they wanted to keep. Their sons regarded me strangely.

I had already made a packet of photographs, letters, and objects that I wanted to keep, which I assumed would not have interested the family because they held only sentimental value. I decided to stay another two weeks in New York and moved out of my hotel. The rent of the deceased's apartment, now empty, had been paid through the end of the month, so I started sleeping in a blanket on the floor.

I set about reading the letters from A***. I spread some photographs on the floor, and all day I tried to reconstitute those two lives affected so differently by a shared sundering. When I was hungry, I ordered Cantonese fried rice and sweet and sour chicken from the neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Every day, around five in the afternoon, I would go sit at a table in the Village to write down the story I had mentally reconstituted. I hadn't notified any of my New York acquaintances that I was in the city. At night I would go to a club without making the effort to meet or recognize anyone. People often did a double take when I passed, as if I had something written on my face, a declaration of my decomposition. One night, while I was waiting on the corner of 54
^th
Street for a taxi, I saw a woman who also seemed to be waiting, staring at me.
She moved away from me swiftly, down the avenue. I was avoiding all company and in turn, for some obscure reason, people seemed to flee from me.

I left New York on a Thursday toward the end of December. America was absorbed in holiday festivities. It was cold; it snowed on the eve of my departure while I was walking toward Times Square. There was a great silence while the first snowflakes fell; handful by handful they prepared to bury the city, forming a shroud over the night that would soon turn to mud. I went back to the apartment and stretched out on the floor. I looked around me: it was night, the lights outside the windows and the lit but silent television projected onto the walls the shadows of the objects still remaining in the room. My back to the screen, I was observing the wall, alternately bluish and red. The shadows trembled and swayed with the rhythmic changes of lighting on the screen. Police car sirens and flashing lights passed rapidly along the avenue below. I was thinking about how this was the last time I would ever sleep in this apartment. This place, so strange, became estranged from me, and, above all, was lost. I was experiencing a premature nostalgia, which was sucking me into a state of melancholy; I was imagining all of this was closed off to me forever before I had even lost it. I saw people pass, rush before my eyes, and no one made me feel anything anymore. The world was dead and yet continued to strut upon its stage. In vain. Within three days, all of this would be dead to me, with no hope of remission. Walking in the streets, flying in planes, taking taxis had lost all meaning; there was no one waiting for me on the other side. This was the last place where something was still familiar. Henceforth everything would be exterior to me, the world a wasteland. I remained with eyes open, unable to escape the creeping sensation, insinuating itself in my flesh, that all was coming to an end. This old woman who had just died was, I suddenly realized,
my last link to the world. There was no other. I no longer knew how to speak, those years of continued hopelessness had sealed my soul in a tomb, and nothing mattered to me anymore. All that had had meaning for me was now withdrawn—I hadn't been able to hold on to any of it—sucked back in like the sea, and I was turning into ice. Someone else would be living here soon; places and traces are swallowed up, disappear and erase themselves, wiping memory's slate clean. All these traces were disappearing and leaving me behind. I knew then that my destiny was only that: to linger on in a deserted world. I felt ice and injury, a fissure forevermore exposed to harsh blasts from the outside. I stayed quiet, unable to pay attention to anyone, absorbed entirely in my own horror, singular and inexpressible.

In the morning I went to the cemetery. Feet in the snow, I was standing before the tomb where the bodies of A*** and A***'s mother were resting. Their names were engraved on a black marble headstone. I wanted to pray but couldn't get past the first verse. The cold numbed my jaw and the words swirled within me; I couldn't pin them down. I wavered a bit, trembling with cold and despair, with powerlessness. I was thinking about this old woman whom I had barely had the time to know, lying beneath me and holding the white rose I had slid into her left hand just before the casket had been closed. And further down: my beloved, returned to dust.

I wanted to write down these two lives, these successive deaths that had annihilated my will to live, that had rendered senseless any project, any investment in a world to which I no longer had any ties.

In fact it had become impossible for me to think of anything else; I needed to devote what was left of my willpower to undertaking the story of my beloved in the form of a biography, to be tidied up later once freed from the infinite reemergence of dispersed fragments in the wandering of waking dreams. Perhaps, if I were to accomplish this task, I would be delivered from the torture inflicted on me by the endless rumination and unruly resurgences that, rather than coming together to form a continuum, only thrust to the surface fractured and atrociously mutilated limbs. I settled into a modest hotel room in Amsterdam at the border of the red-light district and imposed a sort of house arrest upon myself.

This is where for two weeks in front of a typewriter I have endlessly forced my memory to purge itself of its possessor and, with the help of notes hastily made a long time ago or jotted down during my final days in New York, to retrace and reestablish the contours of this love.

V

I can finally type these words:
THE END
. My recollections are finally outlined and crystallized in imprinted phrases, no longer roaming incoherently through my memory. I am no longer living solely through remembering, trying to flee from the memory of these deaths I have at last put down in words.