A Territory Has No Memory
No matter where I am, I just have to close my eyes and instantly everything is present, like the relief on a map:
I see a street in the shadows, heavy with houses, and a little shop selling postcards at the far back where one road is meeting the next and turning bright and loud. The soil is smelling warm of waste, mixing with the odor of fish from the market a few steps further, and I’m holding my breath.
I see a small park, more a large quadrangle really, with trees and benches in the shade. I see men playing Boules and young fathers throwing their children in the air, good-looking fathers, pigeons. I see gamblers, flâneurs, lunatics, runaways.
I see the ATM that’s always crackling slightly when spitting out your warm bills and next to it a homeless woman, not older than thirty. She’s cradling a child in her arms and always they are wrapped in a dozen layers, even if it’s very hot and I’m on my way to the park. It’s as if they want to protect themselves from something; or don’t want to cause trouble among the polished citizens — everyone here who’s not on the ground is part of the bourgeoisie: People who walk barefoot over others but feel disturbed in their Sunday leisure if a beggar is watching them as they take out money and their dogs.
I see pigeon dirt on the pavement, scratched by restless shoes, and the little cinema at the corner where they show black and white movies from the thirties.
I see an empty kitchen, an abandoned desk, a lonely mattress. I see Paris.
There’s still the same fat man behind the bar, barely aged. He taps me a beer and takes my credit card; I sit down at the window gagged by a heavy curtain.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” A voice is suddenly materializing next to me, and before I can even think about the fact that something like that only happens in movies or novels — the sudden appearance of a prophetic character as an action-stirring or eye-opening moment — or before I realize that I have used it for that exact purpose myself, my big toe has already moved the bar stool next to me a little to the side. I half-heartedly mumble something approving, take a big sip of my beer and only then allow myself a proper look at the person now next to me:
I see snow-white hair, surprisingly free of this oily yellow tint that usually haunts drunkards and older people, veins curling like snakes around narrow wrists and a large nose that slipped a little bit too far to the left — a classical French beak. A character nose, as one would say in one of those families where it’s agreed upon to reinterprete a certain ugliness by declaring it a distinguishing feature. It’s hanging in his face like a landmark, big and iron. Not necessarily beautiful, not even very impressive; just there. Silent and proud. I raise my glass to the nose — it ordered a beer, a Belgian one — and we drink in silence.
The nose is living in the face of an older man, one of those typical men who look too rotten to lead a regular life — but then again, who does — , but also too well-groomed to be haunting the undergrounds of the metro; these men are like Atlas, titans of the terrestrial world, they wear coats and the heavy smell of alcohol and in their eyes they carry the knowledge of this world, mostly French literature, 16th and 17th centuries. Many of these men are former professors.
“The city doesn’t remember”, the Nose suddenly says. I put my beer down. “I just thought”, pointing to my notebook lying open on the counter, “you’re probably one of those people who came here a few years ago; you grabbed this city and made it yours, and now you walk on the cobblestoned streets as if they were velvet and gulp down your memories like cheap booze.” I must look somewhat frightened, not least because of the unexpected poetry of this outburst — the Nose grins shrewdly: “1994, dissertation on Montaigne”. Of course.
“I know you people. I have taught you. Hell, once I was one of you. But now I’m the other one: I’m the one you’re stumbling over on your Sunday stroll on the way to the park. I’m the one who is trying to sell you anything — newspapers, plastic roses, handkerchiefs — while you’re sitting in the metro licking each other’s necks and later writing the man with the papers and the roses and the handkerchiefs as a footnote into your story.
I was there, a witness to all your greatest moments in this city: You stood on the bridge, I lay under it. You were in the park, I was standing in front of the fence. You striated the city, I’ve smoothed it again. I’m always there, but you don’t see me.”
He pauses briefly, perhaps to see how I’m taking the message: My glass is empty, eyes glassy. All that time I haven’t said a word, I haven’t defended myself either, how could I, the notebook is our witness. Paris is our witness. The Nose has not opened my eyes, but shut them down: That your own city doesn’t care about you is apparent in weather alone. But that Paris might for me be the epicentre of my biography while for others it’s little more than an agglomeration of bricks with an inadequate health and security system was also to be expected. The Nose and I are living in the same territory, but we do not share a map.
To explore a person like a map, to cross his life like a foreign country. And always remain that: a stranger. One who visits without being part of it; one who climbs walls but never tears them down and opens doors always twice. One who always leaves in the end, always returns. And who will always remember the foreign region more than the region remembers him; a territory has no memory.
He sat at the kitchen table, as always when I come home, so neutral and still, like an Arc de Triomphe with a platter of cheese. I looked him straight in the eye, almost stunned by the sudden certainty, oh sweet opium: “You are my Paris”, I told his face whose territory I would never occupy.
story first published in German in the anthology of Text and the City (astikos Verlag, Germany)
Photo credits: Stanley Kubrick, New York Subway Series for Look Magazine (1946), picture by Mashable
