Читать книгу Satori in Paris and Pic - Jack Kerouac - Страница 20

FOR INSTANCE THE NEXT AFTERNOON AFTER A GOOD sleep, and me spruced up clean again, I met a Jewish composer or something from New York, with his bride, and somehow they liked me and anyway they were lonely and we had dinner, the which I didnt touch much as I hit up on cognac neat again—“Let’s go around the corner and see a movie,” he says, which we do after I’ve talked a half dozen eager French conversations around the restaurant with Parisians, and the movie turns out to be the last few scenes of O’Toole and Burton in “Becket,” very good, especially their meeting on the beach on horseback, and we say goodbye—

Again, I go into a restaurant right across from La Gentilhommière recommended to me highly by Jean Tassart, swearing this time I’ll have a full course Paris dinner—I see a quiet man spooning a sumptuous soup in a huge bowl across the way and order it by saying “The same soup as Monsieur.” It turns out to be a fish and cheese and red pepper soup as hot as Mexican peppers, terrific and pink—With this I have the fresh French bread and gobs of creamery butter but by the time they’re ready to bring me the entree chicken roasted and basted with champagne and then sautéed in champagne, and the mashed salmon on the side, the anchovie, the Gruyère, and the little sliced cucumbers and the little tomatos red as cherries and then by God actual fresh cherries for dessert, all mit wine of vine, I have to apologize I cant even think of eating anything after all that (my stomach’s shrunk by now, lost 15 pounds)—But the quiet soup gentleman moves on to a broiled fish and we actually start chatting across the restaurant and turns out he’s the art dealer who sells Arps and Ernsts around the corner, knows André Breton, and wants me to visit his shop tomorrow. A marvelous man, and Jewish, and we have our conversation in French, and I even tell him that I roll my “r’s” on my tongue and not in my throat because I come from Medieval French Quebec-via-Brittany stock, and he agrees, admitting that modern Parisian French, tho dandy, has really been changed by the influx of Germans, Jews and Arabs for all these two centuries and not to mention the influence of the fops in the court of Louis Fourteenth which really started it all, and I also remind him that François Villon’s real name was pronounced “Ville On” and not “Viyon” (which is a corruption) and that in those days you said not “toi” or “moi” but like “twé” or “mwé” (as we still do in Quebec and in two days I heard it in Brittany) but I finally warned him, concluding my charming lecture across the restaurant as people listened half amused and half attentive, François’ name was pronounced François and not Françwé for the simple reason that he spelled it Françoy, like the King is spelled Roy, and this has nothing to do with “oi” and if the King had ever heard it pronounced rouwé (rwé) he would not have invited you to the Versailles dance but given you a roué with a hood over his head to deal with your impertinent cou, or coup, and couped it right off and recouped you nothing but loss.

Things like that—

Maybe that’s when my Satori took place. Or how. The amazing long sincere conversations in French with hundreds of people everywhere, was what I really liked, and did, and it was an accomplishment because they couldnt have replied in detail to my detailed points if they hadnt understood every word I said. Finally I began being so cocky I didn’t even bother with Parisian French and let loose blasts and pataraffes of chalivarie French that had them in stitches because they still understood, so there, Professor Sheffer and Professor Cannon (my old French “teachers” in college and prep school who used to laugh at my “accent” but gave me A’s.)

But enough of that.

Suffice it to say, when I got back to New York I had more fun talking in Brooklyn accents’n I ever had in me life and especially when I got back down South, whoosh, what a miracle are different languages and what an amazing Tower of Babel this world is. Like, imagine going to Moscow or Tokyo or Prague and listening to all that.

That people actually understand what their tongues are babbling. And that eyes do shine to understand, and that responses are made which indicate a soul in all this matter and mess of tongues and teeth, mouths, cities of stone, rain, heat, cold, the whole wooden mess all the way from Neanderthaler grunts to Martian-probe moans of intelligent scientists, nay, all the way from the Johnny Hart ZANG of anteater tongues to the dolorous “la notte, ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta” of Signore Dante in his understood shroud of robe ascending finally to Heaven in the arms of Beatrice.

Speaking of which I went back to see the gorgeous young blonde in La Gentilhommière and she piteously calls me “Jacques” and I have to explain to her my name is “Jean” and so she sobs her “Jean,” grins, and leaves with a handsome young boy and I’m left there hanging on the bar stool pestering everybody with my poor loneliness which goes unnoticed in the crashing busy night, in the smash of the cash register, the racket of washing glasses. I want to tell them that we dont all want to become ants contributing to the social body, but individualists each one counting one by one, but no, try to tell that to the in-and-outers rushing in and out the humming world night as the world turns on one axis. The secret storm has become a public tempest.

But Jean-Pierre Lemaire the Young Breton poet is tending the bar, sad and handsome as none but French youths can be, and very sympathetic with my silly position as a visiting drunkard alone in Paris, shows me a good poem about a hotel room in Brittany by the sea but after that shows me a meaningless surrealist-type poem about chicken bones on some girl’s tongue (“Take it back to Cocteau!” I feel like yelling in English) but I don’t want to hurt him, and he’s been nice but’s afraid to talk to me because he’s on duty and crowds of people are at the outdoor tables waiting for their drinks, young lovers head to head, I’d-a done better staying home and painting the “Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine” after Girolamo Romanino but I’m so enslaved to yak and tongue, paint bores me, and it takes a lifetime to learn how to paint.