Climbing the hill of Montmartre, St. Anthony on one side of me, Beelzebub on the other. One stands there on the high hill, resplendent in his whiteness. The surf ace of the mind breaks into a choppy sea. The sky reels, the earth sways. Climbing up the hill, above the granulated lids of the roofs, above the scarred shutters and the gasping chimney pots….
At that point where the Rue Lepic lies over on its side for a breathing spell, where it bends like a hairpin to renew the steep ascent, it seems as if a flood tide had receded and left behind a rich marine deposit. The dance halls, the bars, the cabarets, all the incandescent lace and froth of the electrical night pales before the seething mass of edibles which girdle the base of the hill. Paris is rubbing her belly. Paris is smacking her lips. Paris is whetting her palate for the feast to come. Here is the body moving always in its ambiance-a great dynamic procession, like the temple friezes of Egypt, like the Etruscan legend, like the morning of the glory of Crete. Everything staggeringly alive, a swarm of differentiated matter. The warm hive of the human body, the grape cluster, the honey stored away like warm diamonds. The streets swarm through my fingers. I gather up the whole of France in my one hand. In the honeycomb I am, in the warm belly of the Sphinx. The sky and the earth they tremble with the live, pleasant weight of humanity. At the very core is the body. Beyond is doubt, despair, disillusionment. The body is the fundament, the imperishable.
Along the Rue d’Orsel, the sun sinking. Perhaps it’s the sun sinking, perhaps it’s the street itself dismal as a vestibule. My blood is sinking of its own weight into the fragile, glassy hemorrhoids of the nerves. Over the sorrow-bitten facades a thin scum of grease, a thin green film of fadedness, a touch of dementia. And then suddenly, presto! all is changed. Suddenly the street opens wide its jaws and there, like a still white dream, like a dream embedded in stone, the Sacre Coeur rises up. A late afternoon and the heavy whiteness of it is stifling. A heavy, somnolent whiteness, like the belly of a jaded woman. Back and forth the blood ebbs, the contours rounded with soft light, the huge, billowy cupolas taut as savage teats. On the dizzy escarpments the trees stick out like spiny thorns whose fuzzy boughs wave sluggishly above the invisible current that moves trancelike beneath the roots. Pieces of sky still clinging to the tips of the boughs-soft, cottony wisps dyed with an eastern blue. Level above level, the green earth dotted with bread crumbs, with mangy dogs, with little cannibals who leap out of the pouches of kangaroos.
From the bones of the martyrs the white balustrades, the martyred limbs still writhing in agony. Silk legs crossed in Kufic characters, maybe silk sluts, maybe thin cormorants, maybe dead houris. The whole bulging edifice with its white elephant skin and its heavy stone breasts bears down on Paris with a Moorish fatalism.
Night is coming on, the night of the boulevards, with the sky red as hell-fire, and from Clichy to Barbes a fretwork of open tombs. The soft Paris night, like a ladder of toothless gums, and the ghouls grinning between the rungs. All along the foot of the hill the urinals are gurgling, their mouths choked with soft bread. It’s in the night that Sacre Coeur stands out in all its stinking loveliness. Then it is that the heavy whiteness of her skin and her humid stone breath clamps down on the blood like a valve. The night and Paris pissing her white fevered blood away. Time rolling out over the xylophones, the moon gonged, the mind gouged. Night comes like an upturned cuspidor and the fine flowers of the mind, the golden jonquils and the chalk poppies, are chewed to slaver. Up on the high hill of Montmartre, under a sky-blue awning, the great stone horses champ noiselessly. The pounding of their hoofs sets the earth trembling north in Spitzbergen, south in Tasmania. The globe spins round on the soft runway of the boulevards. Faster and faster she spins. Faster and faster, while beyond the rim the musicians are tuning up. Again I hear the first notes of the dance, the devil dance with poison and shrapnel, the dance of flaming heartbeats, each heart aflame and shrieking in the night.
On the high hill, in the spring night, alone in the giant body of the whale, I am hanging upside down, my eyes filled with blood, my hair white as worms. One belly, one corpse, the great body of the whale rotting away like a fetus under a dead sun. Men and lice, men and lice, a continuous procession toward the maggot heap. This is the spring that Jesus sang, the sponge to his lips, the frogs dancing. No trace of rust, no stain of melancholy. The head slung down between the crotch in black frenzied dream, the past slowly sinking, the image balled and chained. In every womb the pounding of iron hoofs, in every grave the roar of hollow shells. Womb and shell and in the hollow of the womb a full-grown idiot picking buttercups. Man and horse moving now in one body, the hands soft, the hoofs cloven. On they come in steady procession, with red eyeballs and fiery manes. Spring is coming in the night with the roar of a cataract. Coming on the wings of mares, their manes flying, their nostrils smoking.
Up the Rue Caulaincourt, over the bridge of tombs. A soft spring rain falling. Below me the little white chapels where the dead lie buried. A splash of broken shadows from the heavy lattice work of the bridge. The grass is pushing up through the sod, greener now than by day-an electric grass that gleams with horsepower carats. Farther on up the Rue Caulaincourt I come upon a man and woman. The woman is wearing a straw hat. She has an umbrella in her hand but she doesn’t open it. As I approach I hear her saying-‘Vest une combinaison!”-and thinking that combinaison means underwear I prick up my ears. But it’s a different sort of combinaison she’s talking about and soon the fur is flying. Now I see why the umbrella was kept closed. “Combinaison!” she shrieks, and with that she begins to ply the umbrella. And all the poor devil can say is— “Mais non, ma petite, mais non!”
The little scene gives me intense pleasure-not because she is plying him with the umbrella, but because I had forgotten the other meaning of “combinaison.” I look to the right of me and there on a slanting street is precisely the Paris I have always been searching for. You might know every street in Paris and not know Paris, but when you have forgotten where you are and the rain is softly falling, suddenly in the aimless wandering you come to the street through which you have walked time and again in your sleep and this is the stree1. you are now walking through.
It was along this very street that I passed one day and saw a man lying on the sidewalk. He was lying flat on his back with arms outstretched-as if he had just been taken down from the cross. Not a soul approached him, not one, to see if he were dead or not. He lay there flat on his back, with arms outstretched, and there was not the slightest stir or movement of his body. As I passed close to the man I reassured myself that he was not dead. He was breathing heavily and there was a trickle of tobacco juice coming from his lips. As I reached the corner I paused a moment to see what would happen. Hardly had I turned round when a gale of laughter greeted my ears. Suddenly the doorways and shopfronts were crowded. The whole street had become animated in the twinkling of an eye. Men and women standing with arms akimbo, the tears rolling down their cheeks. I edged my way through the crowd which had gathered around the prostrate figure on the sidewalk. I couldn’t understand the reason for this sudden interest, this sudden spurt of hilarity. Finally I broke through and stood again beside the body of the man. He was lying on his back as before. There was a dog standing over him and its tail was wagging with glee. The dog’s nose was buried in the man’s open fly. That’s why everybody was laughing so. I tried to laugh too. I couldn’t. I became sad, frightfully sad, sadder than I’ve ever been in all my life. I don’t know what came over me….
All this I remember now climbing the slanting street. It was just in front of the butcher shop across the way, the one with the red and white awning. I cross the street and there on the wet pavement, exactly where the other man had lain, is the body of a man with arms outstretched. I approach to have a good look at him. It’s the same man, only now his fly is buttoned and he’s dead. I bend over him to make absolutely sure that it’s the same man and that he’s dead. I make absolutely sure be fore I get up and wander off. At the corner I pause a moment. What am I waiting for? I pause there on one
