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In the shelterby Jean-Michel MAULPOIXTranslated from the original French by Catherine Wieder
His room is so tiny. Entirely upholstered with books. Some kind of dormer-window opens on to the sky and the roofs of the city.
Sometimes he thinks it quivers : It becomes wider then smaller. It changes its hues, is covered with prints, portraits, with bunches of flowers, then, all at once it empties itself as if it all of a sudden felt the need to free itself from everything, in order to become uninhabitable and pure.
Now there seems to be far too many things around him : pencils, books, boxes filled with letters he is not in the mood to burn, big fat furniture overfilled with papers and clothes. All these things smother him : they live by proxy, steal his looks, suffocate his breath, decide of his gestures and thoughts. Sometimes he wishes he could empty the room, as if he erased the words from a dictionary and wishes he could leave behind him but a wardrobe covered with a sheet like a large haunting coffin.
When the body of the room falls short, he has to invent some others, smaller ones, just by piling on the desk a heap of white pages.
Sometimes the sun gets into the room ; there are large puddles of light on the walls of bright books. Then he interposes between the sun and his pages his shadow of a man, his body so alive facing so many printed words, stories and characters. He remains there for hours, almost as if he were resting on to the wall of a churchyard and behind which one would guess the sea rather than tombstones.
He also likes the shutters to remain half shut. Light, noises and the very landscape don't come in but only half-way. There are rather guessed. Such is the window but also the page whereon only some of the heart of the world gapes. Whereon a few drops of ink drip. A little blood. Almost like a small breath of a sleeper's lips filtering without bothering any one.
From this kind of perch or nacelle, he watches at dusk the blue windows shivering in the dark. Away down there news of the world assuages itself. It loses of its importance and is no longer dramatic. Immersed in lukewarmth, the news takes some kind of family heirloom close to the soup and ham. There, one may die quite a few times without being hurt. There are men and women discussing, little girls already asleep, laughter, soft lips, smells from the kitchens, music of all kinds. From his room, he thinks he ponders over the inside of his own body.
In the morning, he can hear motorbikes and cars. He watches men wearing suits and made-up women whose heels rush on the pavement when they are walking to work. The men have their initials written on black rigid attaché-cases where, surely, they left their hearts in the middle of a mess of pens, of notes and figures. To these dismal suitcases, he prefers ladies' handbags in which one can find white perfumed handkerchieves, a lipstick, some pink powder, a range of blue eye-powders, a wallet with the photographs of young children bathing at the seaside, a small mirror and crumpled letters. He wishes he could slid himself among such a fairyland and let himself languidly roll with their hips. Curious as he is of their perfumes and loves, he wishes he could take the temperature of their hearts.
When the street is quiet again, in the room he practices seducing these winged creatures whose briefly glimpsed silhouettes come back to loiter every night in his dreams as if across the paths of a public garden. For them he indulges to mannered ceremonies. He arranges flower bouquets on the marble of the mantlepiece, fills cups with either China tea or coffee, improvises melodies on the piano, or takes pains to writing endless love letters. He holds his head between his hands, he smokes Virginia cigarettes, he buys white cotton shirts, thick wool pullovers and velvet trousers. He studies cues and poses. Thus he dreams his own life between the table and the window. He exudes softness. He knows the complication and the destitution of the soul.
One willingly imagines that in glass cabinets he would probably start a collection of butterflies and weird potteries, of crystal, chiselled ivory snuff-boxes, clocks and statuettes, all things close to which a few peripeteias and pangs of his own existence could be gathered.
As a child he used to collect stamps. He remembers Summer evenings in his grand-father's house, in the country, taking place like minute rituals. At the end of the meal, the table was cleared, the oil-cloth was wiped clean, then grand-father would go to one of the drawers of his desk to look for his red-bound albums and large wood-varnished boxes. He would browse his collection, linger on his memories of the War and give him his « duplicates », slid into thin cristal paper envelopes.
He liked to think that the adventure of man on earth would be reduced to an album of pictures both precarious and precious, granting each event a value with no connection with its importance in history. He liked to mingle at years random kings and locomotives, bunches of flowers and monuments, heroes, scientists well-known writers, basket ball players and orphans. He would inspect the memory of the world as a catalogue of dead things which may as well have contained butterfly wings.
During the night he translates tales and poems.
Browsing the dictionary, he listens to the rain beating over the tiles and the gutter, he fancies the regular paces of horses, the rumble of carriages on the cobble-stones of the street and the shouts of coach-men. He fancies revellers wearing tails, prostrate on the leather seats and demi-mondaines with rings under their eyes weeping secretely for ghastly lovers, pretending to watch the sky.
He paints a few small watercolours he gives his relatives on the occasion of the new year. He likes scribbling down a few words on the back of the painting. A few strokes of brush or of pen, it's almost the same thing. The only things that matter are softness and flutter diluting over the page. Sometimes unhappiness lies in the landscape, he would say, within everything given and I can't receive and take.
He frees so much better from himself in painting rather than in ink. A few patches of colour are enough : they enable him to come closer to what he loves.
Such tasks entertain him a little. Though they don't prevent him from pondering over death, at least they make it a little more familiar to him.
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