Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 38

Pantoum

The second full night he and Simone spent together at Joë’s house in Carcassonne, making love, sleeping, waking to talk, to make love again, Simone said, “Joë said”—tracing her finger through the tangle of dark hairs on his chest—“you were writing a book?” She was so fearful of making a gaffe, of earning Jacques’ contempt that she formed the next sentence in her mind and repeated it several times, daring herself to say it, as one gathers up one’s courage to jump into a frigid lake: “What’s it about?” How stupid that question, now that it is out of her.

(Later, Jacques will write: “Master of the word you speak/Slave of the word you have spoken.”)

Jacques will say, “Kupu-kupu terbang melintang / Terbang di laut di hujung karang,” and kiss her on the forehead.

“Oh, now I understand. Now it’s all perfectly clear to me.”

“Well, it’s a bit complicated—I’m writing about the time I spent in Madagascar, although not of the ‘colonial officer telling charming stories about the natives’ genre. Mostly, I suppose, it’s about hainteny, which is a form of oral poetry in Madagascar. The Merina people of Madagascar are probably of Malayan origin, and there are some similarities between the hainteny and the pantoum.”

Simone will be silent.

“You must forgive me. I can be a terrible pedant. Here I am in bed with a beautiful woman, discussing literary forms.”

“Oh, no, no. I’m interested. I’m fascinated by—in everything you have to say. It’s just—I didn’t get much of an education from the nuns. And then, when I was in Istanbul, I was trying to learn—for instance, to learn Turkish, and I did a little bit—but then—the pregnancy came, Marcel—and I was sent back here. I suppose it’s all a bit—scattershot—my education, my lack thereof. It’s so hard: having no one to guide me.”

“Well,” he will say, fondly, a bit pleased at delivering a lecture in bed—Sala would never have allowed such a thing—I have patients to see in the morning, I need my sleep!—“the basic form of a pantoum is that, after the first stanza, the first line of the next stanza repeats the second line of the previous stanza, and the third line repeats the fourth line.”

She could understand it better if she had a piece of paper and a pencil or if she could count on her fingers.

“It all sounds a bit ponderous when you put it that way, like double-entry bookkeeping. Are you familiar with Baudelaire’s—”

“Oh, Baudelaire! I’ve heard of him!”

Jacques will cough, “—with his Harmonie du soir?” And he’ll recite:

“Now is the time when trembling on its stem

Each flower fades away like incense;

Sounds and scents turn in the evening air;

A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!

“Each flower fades away like incense;

The violin thrills like a tortured heart;

A melancholy waltz, a soft and giddy dizziness!

The sky is sad and beautiful like some great resting-place.”

He will see she’ll be about to go into a rhapsody of delight over the poem, and want to warn her off—he won’t yet be ready to show her the full force of his disdain: “Myself, I’m not an acolyte of the cult of Baudelaire. I can do without the ‘melancholy waltzes’ and the ‘tortured hearts.’ I ally myself more with the Futurists: the factory gutter, the ditches filled with muddy water. But that is neither here nor there, is it, my darling?” He won’t really be that close to the Futurists, he’ll make that statement more as a way of shocking her.

“The notion of originality is a queer, even frightening thing to the Merina people. They repeat the proverbs as they have been handed down, because to do otherwise would be to dishonor the ancestors, who gave them this wisdom. And yet, when the proverbs are repeated, in juxtaposition to one another, they take on a certain character from what surrounds them: not just the other words, but the circumstances. And despite it all, I want to be original in this book I’m writing. Even though I’ve tried to shed my white skin, I’m a European.”