(3.78 m2)
Just on the left upon entering, after taking 2 or 3 steps into the hallway-entryway, we push open the bathroom door: 1 tiny room 2.15 m long and 1.76 m wide.
Inferior Mirage
The most striking thing at 1st, aside from its smallness, is the fact that it’s not a room in and of itself, but actually a part of the entryway, demarcated from the latter by means of a Sheetrock partition wall that 1 solid ax blow could easily bring down: a room added onto, or rather, carved out of, another. At this point in Paris’s history, when the standard of living has caught up with rising sea levels, this fairly necessary room often has to be cobbled together from nothing, since it’s long been common in apartments both old and modest for the advertised “bathroom” to be as substantial as those “inferior” mirages of oases thirsty travelers believe they see in deserts. In my personal hierarchy of rooms, however, my bathroom ranks very high. (Which might not be the case for the majority of Parisians, in whose homes the bathroom is usually the black sheep, a black mark against the supposed superiority of Western civilization…) Even though I’ve had to downscale my ambitions in this space, as in so many others, the fact that my bathroom actually has a bathtub elevates the room to the upper ranks of its class. In French, real estate vocabulary has invented the term salle d’eau—a phrase revelatory in its sheer plainness—to distinguish bathrooms actually containing a bathtub from those that don’t. The literalness of the appellation “water room” is so bereft of dignity that it bestows upon its rival, the bathtub-laden salle de bains, or “baths room,” an automatic prestige.
Camera Fluida
As a counteroffensive against the room’s persistent dampness, the bathroom door is always left open. Situated more or less across from the hallway-entryway’s window, opening the 1 allows the other to air out—an ingenious arrangement, as those all too familiar with the Parisian obsession for ventilation will agree. My bathroom is fairly shabby, but at least it can be aerated. After all, there are bathrooms, even in some luxury apartments, devoid of all ventilation: an absolute heresy. A proper bathroom presupposes at least 1 airway for the eradication of offensiveness. Every stench must wither and die in this camera lucida, in the full light of day.
The Glass House
To make the room as bright as possible, I’ve had the rest of the entryway-hallway’s dividing wall built with glass bricks. The effect of this transparency, although moderate or practically nil as seen from the hallway side, is arresting from inside in the bathroom. My original hope had been to wall up the entire room with glass bricks, so as to establish a sort of correspondence between this glass and the water flowing within, but the Romanian workers in charge of renovating my apartment talked me out of this, because of the danger inherent in the bricks’ increased weight relative to the plaster wall they’d be embedded in. I learned that to hold them in place, iron bars would have to be installed to reinforce the wall around them. These bricks total 36 (4 across × 9 down): Michel Leiris’s age when he put the finishing touches on Manhood, as well as the year in the 20th century when the French won the right to have weekends.
As is always the case for the glass bricks used in bathrooms, these so-called transparent blocks are clouded so as to avoid prying eyes. It may seem strange for a bachelor to resort to such methods of concealment, more germane to communal life, but this useless effort pleases me, contravening as it does glass’s original virtue. In fact, the faces and bodies deformed by this system seem all the more suggestive. A nude body visible behind a square of distorting glass engenders a sort of ecstasy: a deformation not unrelated to the 1 that occurs during sexual congress, when the tumult that takes hold of all features seems to bring them back to a rawer level of humanity.
International Klein Room
Being a part of the artwork I’ve hoped to turn my apartment into, the bathroom hews to my conception of a disconcerting, outrageous minimalism: it’s covered almost entirely in white tile, the bathtub and 1 small stretch of blue wall notably excepted. It exudes a sort of emptiness that, given its function, I wanted to affirm, resisting all needless ornamentation, all superfluous adornment, finding it unthinkable to overpower such a sober space. A bathroom is a bathroom; it is, more legitimately than any other room, tautological. Only the blue/white binary bears witness to any chromatic ambition: of the 36 glass bricks, 2 are the same blue as that of the bathtub’s tiles and the section of wall. This shade of blue verges on International Klein Blue (IKB), and I like to think that this 2-toned room accordingly calls to mind 1 of those modernist artists who considered color and design of equal value. Klein was very much a pro artist, but his con-artist side does make me smile slightly; there’s 0 question that he made art purely for the art world and so purely as a means of building up his reputation, which makes him an authentic impostor. Which means my bathroom is more authentic than Klein ever was.
Raynaud White Tiles
But in this watery space it’s Jean-Pierre Raynaud’s influence that’s most keenly felt, through those 15 cm × 15 cm white tiles, selected in homage to his “Maison” in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, to which he devoted some 24 years of artistic labor before destroying it. On the floor, the whitish tiles clash slightly with the purer white of the walls and the indefinite color of the baseboards, which contribute to the room’s tonal coherence—its chief asset (augmented by the grout’s light gray). Because I did an imperfect job of resealing them recently, these floor tiles are separated by a grout that differs from the white-silicone caulk that’s always edged the bathtub. Refilling the spaces between such tiles is an essential element of decorative art: in effect, 1 very beautiful tile’s effect can be marred by the mere presence of some useless grout or, on the contrary, diminished by the lack of any clear divide separating its brothers and itself: between the 2 schools (visible grout or 0 grout), I lean toward a distinct grout and a color that meshes with that of the tiles; this grout isn’t tinted, however, so a sad dullness keeps the tiles’ color from standing out, because the mortar is too dirty to form a distinct boundary. This attention to seemingly insignificant details is nothing more than the syllabic rhythm of a period or the transition between 2 sentences. Carefully considering this question of seams between tiles, I end up pondering those discreet aesthetic principles of demarcating words, shapes, and things. In painting as well, the thick contours of Manet or Léger stand out equally as much.
Unsealed
Persistent humidity has ruined the floor tiling. 3 or 4 of the tiles are in place thanks only to sheer miracle, considering that so many puddles of water have dissolved the caulk that once held them in place. The loosened tiles’ pattern brings to mind muddled memories of unpleasant dreams, visions of falls or treacherous slips or tooth extractions. The detached tile, testament to the inherent frailty of the human species, underscores the half-abject, half-touching erosion against which the art of permanence constantly struggles. The fear and disgust that degradation, breakage, and detached fingernails stir within me all find resonance in this room, as if this particular space I tread daily were more of a threat than any of the others. Unlike their counterparts on the wall, which attract the connoisseur’s eye in their perfection, my floor tiles are humble. My incompetence with tools is astounding; it took me 2 hours to straighten them out with a special compound that now holds them a bit better.
Even without squatting for closer inspection, it’s easy to see that the 1st tile by the room’s entrance is broken. The only way I can explain this damage is as the result of a woman’s heel, and I suspect it’s 1 of my friends, who always wears high heels, and who ignored my explicit rule to only ever walk barefoot in the bathroom, although that’s a decree even I don’t always follow. As such, this cracked square stands as evidence of the inevitable failure of every prohibition.
The Hyacinth Tapestry
To combat the floor’s dampness, I’ve put down a little dark-purple mat that keeps the floor around the bathtub dry. I picked out this beautiful deep violet color as a way to elevate the floor rug’s humble function: aside from the touch it adds to the room’s bluish components (which it outclasses in true blueness), this color manages to redeem a cloth meant for 1’s feet. The problem with such minor objects, diminished by their designated uses, merits serious thought: I would be lying if I claimed that all the objects I own have equal value to me. I can’t accord as much weight to this floor covering as I do to my computer (→ OFFICE) or my pink-and-white-striped shirt (→ BEDROOM), but I don’t hold it in such contempt that I can’t take note of its qualities. So I’ve done my best to highlight its assets, and its amethyst tone is the predominant 1 in my eyes—I care far less about its cottony softness, frankly. I try to give each object a chance.
Pedology
There may not be much room to walk around in here, but being barefoot does offer me some paltry few extra centimeters, and those of fairly small proportions would get even more. Pedology refers to both the study of soil and the study of children: this mat, having endured plenty of abuse, has also been subjected to overuse at the hand (or, rather, foot) of a particular child, who swished it swiftly over my tiles, as if it were a mop: 2 uses in 1.
2 Sources Are Better Than 1
Illumination comes from 2 sources: 1 wired ceiling light that diffuses a yellowish light, and 1 little fluorescent light over the sink, which diffuses a whitish light: despite the “ish” suffixes, I’m not unpleased by the result. Even with their respective ugliness, the 2 lights together result in something much more agreeable than their separate uses would have hinted at. Whitish and yellowish, in effect, cancel each other out; using only 1 of these light sources chills 1 side of the room, accentuating the tiles’ formalism and the health-spa ambiance. From this I can deduce a theorem: 2 austere light sources, fighting against each other, result in 1 successful illumination. Of course, the range of theories about proper illumination is almost as complex as their real-world application. It’s rare to find 1 lighting setup that satisfies all parties present. But the truth is that I’ve successfully subdued my bathroom’s clinical tone.
Water Damage
The ceiling is a fake 1 that, in addition to its light fixture, boasts 1 small air vent. This barrier was recently sabotaged by my 4th-floor neighbors, who, intending to fix their bathtub themselves, sent such huge quantities of water raining down that the bathroom’s white wood-tone paneling buckled. Although these neighbors do annoy me for various reasons that I’ll get into in due time (→ LIVING ROOM, OFFICE), I don’t consider their attack on my bathroom to be their worst offense. And I do bear in mind that there are 4 of them up there living in the same amount of space I do, and that their limited means have forced them to do without the services of those fellows who can turn shit into gold (that is, plumbers, not writers).
Bathorama
Due to the room’s space constraints (shutting the door again after entering means squeezing around said door while sucking in your gut and pulling in your butt, as if the room were doing double duty as a gym), a walking tour is out of the question, so a gawking tour will have to do. 1st, on the left, there’s the old-style sink that I bought the day I moved in (September 11, 2001) for the modest sum of ₣100 at the Vanves flea market. As a retro counterpoint to the room’s general modernism, this ceramic piece has a picturesque charm, but it has 2 objective disadvantages that I did not foresee at the time, and which, if I were granted the chance to make the purchase over again, would keep me from repeating my mistake, misconstruing these flaws as exciting features: namely, 1st, that such sinks are set on a single tapered foot, whereas modern-day sinks tend to come with wide bases in which 1 finds a little cabinet for storing bathroom accessories. This extra space, which would have solved the problem faced by every Parisian, was in my case wasted by acquiring this ancient model that, privileging a columnar form for the sake of 1 sink’s singular function qua sink, forces me to keep as few items here as possible, leaving the area fairly empty.
Original Nudity
In its non-erotic sense, nudity is natural in bathrooms and bedrooms; possible in the toilet; furtive in the living room and the entryway, when these need to be crossed in order to enter the bathroom; incongruous in the kitchen and the office; and simply disagreeable in the cellar. The pleasure of being naked at home is that of unrehearsed performance. The nightmare: a nudist colony, already an attack against eroticism, reaching its nadir in the form of a convenience store where people must run their errands in the nude.
Mixing Faucet
The 2nd and chief disadvantage of this ex-1-star-hotel sink, which reminds 1 of Marcel Carné’s films (and an era when the pure whiteness of laundry paired nicely with a particularly French degree of physical and moral filthiness), was, for a long while, its lack of a mixing faucet. Its 2 wholly separate taps made it impossible to get comfortably warm water except by filling the sink, a problem made most acute in winter when the cold water was incredibly cold and the hot water boiling hot: brushing my teeth called for a tooth mug, an object I eventually had to get rid of because its ultimate uselessness annoyed me. The more satisfactory solution was to install a mixing faucet, which I put off, for financial reasons (€200), as long as I could, and which, in the end, when I finally took the plunge, only served to underscore further the manifold disappointments inherent in owning what had once been a thing of beauty. Thus do so many objects that seduced us at 1st come, over time, to betray us.
Opening the drain, set in the white enamel, is done by means of a central powdery-gray bump that, when I squint my eyes, looks like an old squat inkwell, or maybe a tiny mountain, topped by its latch, which I push from left to right to empty the sink and vice versa to hold in the water. By contrast, the dizzying complexity of modern plumbing’s mechanisms tends to be completely hidden behind the sink itself. Sometimes so completely that even the latch is eliminated outright. How does anyone stopper their sink in such cases? I was once confronted by just this problem at a luxury hotel, and subsequently spent 5 exasperated minutes trying and failing to solve it.
Enamel
As befits the structure of this type of sink, its soap holders are characterized by grooves etched in its enamel as well as all the dirty remnants of collective sanitation. I use the 1 on the left to hold my toothbrush and toothpaste, while the 1 on the right holds liquid soap in a bottle, which I prefer for hygienic reasons to bar soap, which always leaves scummy traces. My favorite toothpaste brand has long been Fluocaril, owing to its medicinal flavor, its green & white packaging, the “fluor” of its name implying both fluidity and fluoride, the “car” perfectly suited to carefully fighting dental caries. Since the practice of occasionally changing toothpaste brands is recommended so that 1’s teeth don’t become habituated to the same product, I’ve opted for Elmex as my alternate, whether the usual orange tube or the green 1 for sensitive teeth. French people, on average, buy 1 toothbrush each year, and I take pride in being above average relative to this population apparently so skeptical of dental care as to be downright suspicious.
The Tooth-and-Footman
The toothbrush calls for a vertical holder I cannot provide; therefore, it reclines horizontally on the sink, a disappointing pose given its form, but less so than when I try to keep it upright by wedging it behind 1 of the taps; its thin profile keeps it from staying put and it falls down like a bony dancer. I’m reminded of the photos in Eric Madeleine’s project Made in Eric, in which the artist lends his body to various household uses, at 1 point offering up his foot so as to utilize the space between 2 of his toes as a toothbrush holder.
Water Supply
Sometimes I run the water and watch it benevolently, and the urge to praise Paris’s water supply, which seems so ordinary to us today as to occlude the practically unearthly difficulties of its implementation, runs through my veins. Marveling at the technological world is as fine a way as any to while away some time waiting for death, though it would be stretching a cliché into the realm of hyperbole to say that the taps “sing out” with water (in similarly hyperbolic terms, when I ascend in an elevator, I tell myself that maybe I’ll meet the gods on Olympus; when I descend into a parking lot, maybe I’ll meet Orpheus). The water’s flow, a source of tranquility, never ceases to intrigue me: I’m astonished that there’s always enough, and if I were a mad scientist, I’d keep the faucet open ad libitum to see if and when this infinitude ended. This prospect of extravagant waste both delights and terrifies me; I’ve also learned that Paris’s water is now under public management again, and that makes me happy. Even if I praise private property (as a status symbol), the idea of privatizing water seems idiotic to me. Nothing could be more ominous than nationalizing personal effects, as in the Poland of bygone days, but nothing could be more idiotic than putting basic necessities under private management. I’ll shut off the faucet of my speech here.
The Mirror Amplifies
Above the sink, I’ve hung 1 large mirror that’s 1.05 m wide and 75 cm tall and makes the room look bigger while also attesting to the strength of my upper body. Due to hot water vapor, this mirror has gone white in its lower-right corner; but its bright, clean surface is the 1 spatial amplification I’m most proud of. My dwarf bathroom has its “Versailles” side. In the mirror where he gazes at his reflection, Narcissus multiplies: Mao × Marilyn = Mishima.
He Gets Bored
I’m bare-chested. I’m in front of the mirror. I fill the sink. The water is warm. I flick on the little fluorescent light. I splash water on my cheeks. I rinse the blade of the Bic razor. I take some shaving cream. I pat it on my cheeks. I rub it under my jawbone, around my mouth. The shaving cream covers the bottom of my face. I spread it on both sides. I draw the razor over my skin. I hold its handle with my left hand. The cream squishes slightly as it’s scraped away. I look in the mirror. The stubble puts up a fight. I dip the blade in the water. Hair floats on the surface. I begin again. I take extra care around any moles. I rinse myself off.
The Haze of Forgetfulness
Hot water vapor has clouded the mirror. Shaving must cease. The door has to be opened, as well as the hallway window, in order to let in some fresh air, so the operation can resume. During this interregnum, he traces words with his finger on the glass. What words? He’s forgotten.
Bath/Shower
The bathtub’s superiority over a mere shower is in its double function—and the converse is not true. Shower stalls resist horizontality, but bathtubs don’t forbid verticality. Shower advocates have their justifications (generally spatial constraints), but are rarely consistent: their fundamentalism will never succeed in supplanting the bathtub. A bathroom without a bathtub, no matter how well appointed it might be, is merely a salle d’eau. Luxury bathes; poverty showers. The most broad-minded of aqueous solutions is to combine both shower hose and bathtub.
Standing to shower, I feel all too keenly the inadequacy of my sanitary setup, since I don’t have any place to hang the shower head. Either I’m forced to soap myself up while holding the nozzle against my hip or my thigh, a posture that results in wasteful sprays of water, or if I set the hose at the bottom of the basin, the water’s pressure makes it twist and spew everywhere. So I hold its damp head down with my foot, a gesture that I always accompany with the verse of a great poet: “My foot on some serpent where our love fires the coals.”
A Room for All Seasons
All arguments in favor of a bathtub prove useless in the summer, when the shower rejected by wintertime finally wins out, just as southern France, where creature comforts aren’t much valued, wins out over the north. No other room is so relative, or so sensitive, to the changing seasons. Time wins out over space.
Shower Psycho
A significant absence explains all the water overflowing onto my tiles: I’ve always refused to hang up a shower curtain here, as though a lack of separation between body and room would give this space a greater feeling of openness, confer onto the act of washing a greater degree of innocence. The inherent ugliness of shower curtains serves to contradict their intended purpose, whether we’re talking about a clinical white model or some fantasia, although especially in the 1st case, where the whiteness will inevitably, over time, come to struggle against a grime just as likely to have originated from its own plastic as from contact with humans; I can’t shake the thought of certain curtains in certain sordid pension showers whose flowing folds shelter nothing so much as their own teeming germ life. No, the shower curtain—that disingenuous object emblematized by its use in Hitchcock’s Psycho, where it was made to serve as censor as well as mise en scène—may be fantastically interesting, in its way, but is quite, quite impossible in reality.
The Bathtub
Sad surrogate for a happy childhood, salvation of many a depressingly cold winter day, material and moral balm for all of life’s ills, the bathtub is the site of a pleasure so pure that an adult film actress once insisted in an interview that her 1 absolute requirement after a day of filming was a good hot bath with a sweet vermouth on the rocks—I can quote those words verbatim. Bought at the Batkor warehouse in the northern suburbs, for the price of ₣1,500, this 1.58-m-long bathtub has an optimal 65 cm depth (the Ritz’s bathtubs, by comparison, are 69 cm). I am constitutionally unable to take seriously the financial argument that the “cost” of a bath is 3 times that of a shower, even less to pay heed to the ecological necessity of restricting water usage to save the planet. I can’t imagine living in a house without a bathtub, much less living in a capital city devoid of such balneal pleasures. My tub is open from October to May, daily during the winter, always in the evenings.
Drawing the Bath
In the delight it causes, somewhat similar to the anticipation preceding the commingling of bodies, filling up 1’s bathtub is 1 of the most comforting forms of passivity to exist. While the water pours into the bathtub, 1’s interim activities, circumscribed within the time needed for the bath to fill (13 minutes), take on a particular charm: defecating, completing some administrative task, putting on some music, taking off 1’s clothes. Though it used to be the purview of servants, this is precisely the sort of task that makes for a legitimate argument in favor of each person’s autonomy: I wouldn’t like it if someone else dealt with my bath; I want to check the water temperature myself and adjust the hot and cold knobs without having to appear in a bathrobe before some subaltern. Drawing 1’s bath is an intimate affair, and a subjective 1 too, speaking physically: should my counterpart catch me drawing my bath, she would undoubtedly be alarmed by the (according to her norms) near-boiling temperature of the water.
Special Effects
My superhot bathwater produces a heavy mist that spreads almost into the hallway, just like a special effect: penetrating the bathroom, the explorer comes across a new land, where he might find the creature from the black lagoon or the still-warm body of Elvis Presley.
Yonder Water
When I’m in the bathtub, I always leave the bathroom door open to take in the view of the entryway-hallway. In this way I can increase my prospects to infinity. There are 2 possible ways to orient the bathtub in this room, corresponding to each side of the bath, and having the drain positioned closer to the back practically forbids me from orienting it on its right side; so I’ve positioned the head of the bathtub closer to the open end of the room, where the view is more agreeable, but I don’t remember whether I made that decision consciously or whether the plumbers themselves, in their duty-bound professionalism, did.
In the bathtub, through a sort of poor man’s telescope, I can see 2 rooms at the same time, the doorframe perfectly narrowing my field of vision. There’s a sort of satisfaction in looking at 1 room while I’m in another, as if at a painted panorama: and what I see is, as a matter of fact, the wide-open hallway window overlooking the courtyard, veiled by its white curtain. The greatest pleasure, when it’s beautiful out, is in leaving this window open while I’m bathing; then I can enjoy the fresh air that plays off the warm water and the near-invisible whiteness of the sheet gently billowing in the breeze. The idea of taking a bath thus exposed while still hidden from the outside world delights me, as if I were secretly flouting public decency: this horizontal immobility is conducive to a delicate sort of intoxicating and innocuous contemplation of 1’s surrounding environment, wherein the bath’s aqueous caresses summon up mental constructs verging on phantasmagoria. Sea baths don’t have this same steadiness due to the boundaries of 1’s compartment: in them you’re swallowed up by living matter, which wears you out with all the physical exertion necessary to keep from being overwhelmed; swimming pools, by contrast, must yield to the collective, to sports, to bathing suits.
In Focus
If I slowly raise my dripping hand to occlude the rectangle of the door 50 centimeters in front of it, I can reach a 3rd visual level. I focus on the stretch of wall perpendicular to the floor, I spread out my fingers, and I imagine, behind the curtain’s opaque cloth, a landscape that is not my mediocre courtyard but nature in full bloom. 1 other element visible from the moment in space-time that is the bath (and which might strike a chord with other aficionados of this simple domestic pleasure) is the electricity meter described supra.
Placidity Meter
It’s unnerving to focus on this meter from an aquatic position; it’s a constant reminder of death’s dominion over life, as any contact between water currents and electric currents produces effects we know all too well. Rocking in this warm water and looking at this apparatus, I ponder how the thread of my life is bound to a fictive space: barely 1 meter separates me from a potential suicide, but this definitive divide between 2 antagonistic worlds is life itself, in a nutshell. This interval is sufficient. And I’m delighted, if only slightly, to know that I’ll remain untouched by any electric currents as I splash around in a watery current, even as my thoughts steep in a horrific scene: a masked woman breaking in with an electric hand mixer that she throws into the water to electrocute me! Ever since I saw it as a teenager, the Columbo episode that depicts this murder has stayed traumatically intact in my mind.
Immersion
Bathtime is clearly my time for contemplation, for losing myself in dreams, feelings, and sensations, in flights of fancy, abortive theories, and recollections of overheard remarks, in memories, prospects, furtive sentences, thoughts, or obsessions generated by this calm immersion of my entire body. I’ve set the world to rights less often over coffee than in bathtubs, all by myself, scrubbing my skin and my soul, meditating on this small, warm horizon. Taking a bath is 1 of those rare passive activities during which synesthesia occurs with almost 0 effort: touch, clear sight, 1’s own smell, the taste of the water, and the soft sound of waves lapping or flowing all unite in a Gesamtkunstwerk that has, I think, practically no equivalent. Even my bathroom itself is changed by bathing: the glass wall finds its ultimate raison d’être, the water in all its fluidity heralds a suspended instant, during which the bather may enjoy true freedom.
4 Sides of 1 Bathtub
I attribute 4 qualities to the bathing rectangle—Well-Being, Placidity, Immobility, Nonexistence—which are not the same as those of the bed (→ BEDROOM).
Cleanliness Is Next to What?
My left foot, when I’m in the water, rests on the far edge and jostles against 2 plastic containers: 1 is normal Klorane shampoo, with a consistency akin to sperm or, more innocuously, thick coconut milk; the other is an organic chamomile shampoo, Cattier brand, which looks like honey. Nearby, my soap, which I’ve chosen for its transparency—the better to keep any detrimental colors from sneaking into the bathroom and harming its overall harmony—is called Neutralia. According to its label, it’s acid-free. Like anyone else with mildly obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I’ve joined the cult of cleanliness, and if I had it my way I’d wash myself several times each day, which I do in summer, since I can barely stand the smell of my own sweat—except for when it’s from a romantic tryst, since then it carries an added spice, and is resolved, eventually, by a shower. Like Mayakovsky, who reportedly scrubbed himself many times daily because he couldn’t bear his own scent, I’ve progressively moved from a reasonable standard of hygienic care to 1 that’s far more extreme, even though the adverse effects of this have already become clear: skin washed too often will lose its sweat-regulating cells, and even though I never used to sweat, now, as a result of all my repeated scrubbing, my frequent showers, and my successive baths, I do. Between French hyperfilthiness and American overcleanliness, I’m trying to find a happy medium.
Interesting Stench
Every room has its own stench; the bathroom’s smell doubtlessly comes from some hidden standing water. It’s a putrid roasted-cauliflower smell that’s revolting, sporadic, but ultimately interesting because it’s untraceable.
Door + Towel
I don’t have a towel rack. So I use the door as a rack, by hanging my towel over the top. The inconvenience in this is that the paint flakes under the humidity; the advantage is that by putting the towel in contact with the door, it’s clear that no object is autonomous: the towel has to have a place to hang just as the door has to serve its greater use. So I’ve overcome the purported uniqueness of objects, which had been annoyingly insistent: I’ve expanded this 1’s range of possible uses. And in the excitement of this revelation, naked in the shower that’s also a bathtub, I’ll just grab the huge red towel (which I’ll end up using again and again over the course of my life) with a swift, rapid, athletic yank.
Washing Machine
Past the bathtub, on the right, the washing machine sits snugly between the tub and the wall separating it from the toilet. I know that for safety reasons it’s not advisable to have a plugged-in washing machine too close to a water source, but these safety standards, a vexed social issue, make safety a mere pretext for extorting more money: electrocution, despite being a far greater risk than termites or strangers, isn’t averted by these “safety standards,” because Paris’s apartments are so small that there’ll never be enough space in between everything to guarantee safety.
For anyone who’s interested, I own a Vedette washing machine that I bought in 2008, having acquired the preceding 1 in 1989, purchases that ought to have offended my stated aims of quality and multifunctionality, but space constraints conspired to allow this monomaniacal triumph of poor workmanship into my home. All things considered, though, the machine’s performance has been perfectly acceptable—unless of course we measure its effective life not in terms of how many years I’ve owned it but in terms of how many hours or days it’s actually spent doing its job. The latter metric, unfortunately, is horribly suboptimal. I do only about 1 load of laundry per week, and 1 every 10 days would be 36 wash cycles per year (let’s say 40 with the summer). The machine works for 1 hour 40 minutes as many as 40 times a year, which is a risible performance by Kapitalism’s standards.
And Then My Umbrella Ella Ella Eh Eh Eh
Between the bathtub and the washing machine is a very narrow gap (2.80 cm wide) filled by 1 off-brown umbrella that I found in a movie theater and that, as is usually the case when it comes to petty theft, I’ve retained instead of attempting to return to its inattentive, unlucky owner. This umbrella, which I almost never use (I feel like it rains less than it used to), has found its natural resting place here; besides which, it’s so ugly I never bother taking it with me when I go outside—I’d practically be inviting thunder and lightning if I did! So I’ve buried it in this nook, where it often falls over from sheer inactivity. The disdain that Bloch, Proust’s minor friend, often demonstrated toward such belongings is certainly justified here; still, I feel as though it would be about as easy to get rid of this thing that happens not to belong to me as to get rid of my entire worldview.
Awkward Little Nook
Behind the washing machine, a small nook serves to hide laundry detergent and the sponges I keep for cleaning the apartment. These awkward little nooks, these low-lying areas, murky and forgettable, found in every apartment, are mostly inhabited by dust bunnies, which don’t really belong in a pristine bathroom. A rubber-gloved hand (mine) sometimes ventures into these depths, assisted by a vacuum cleaner’s nozzle.
Advertising
My preferred laundry detergent has always been Ariel, the brand that my mother used, and that’s far from the only way in which I’m my mother’s son. Ariel’s excellent advertising campaigns, as some of my cohort may remember, consisted of insisting that 2 packs of traditional laundry detergent didn’t hold a candle to a single pack of Ariel—resulting in a housewife refusing what should have been a good deal (2 for the price of 1!) thanks to the irrefutable justification of quality over quantity. But the other reason I’ve been loyal to this brand for so long is because, a very long time ago indeed, I had a girlfriend who went by the same beautiful Shakespearean name, and I’ve always clung to that memory, because, in my heart, eroticism endures less through images than through names. Detergent can’t work on the toughest of stains, and this subtle propaganda has set permanently; these days, I use a powder that may be less expensive than Ariel, but no less effective: in terms of actual ingredients, I don’t see any qualitative difference. Publicists, even for literature, are the least interesting people in the world.
What Dryer?
Among the room’s other prominent components, there’s a clothesline attached to the wall, its full length (3 m) vastly exceeding the room’s span, which is why I bothered to get a washing machine with a built-in drying function (€800), although it doesn’t dry terribly well, which means I end up pulling out the retractable clothesline anyway. Like so many city slickers I dread the fishy scent of clothes still damp for lack of space to dry. Sometimes my thoughts linger on a laundry room of a size I could only wish for; but for laundry there’s nothing like the countryside. Hanging it all to dry on 1 line strung between 2 tree trunks will always be a priceless luxury; in French, the kinship between the word for laundry, linge, and the word for line, ligne, is a perfect reason to insist that 1’s linge should always dry on a taut ligne. Even now, though, manually hanging clothes up to dry offers to this launderer’s eye such unforgettable imagery: clustered hillsides and clouded skies of cloth swept by crisp air, textured textiles of every color billowing in an April breeze.
In Praise of Design
The simple gray plastic of this retractable clothesline—and, after all, every object has to be designed completely, from its colors and materials to its mechanisms, before it can be produced in the real world—succeeds because it was so well thought through: I have all the more respect for these sorts of functionally satisfying items, being formally perfect, than I do for objets d’art that are astonishing in their sheer pointlessness. Here, German industry (especially the Leifheit brand, the airy, twinned syllables of its name rolling right off my tongue) unites aesthetics and standards, in contrast to a France that remains cloven between these spheres. The horizontal white base serves to support a sliding plastic bar, which I pull to unwind the string; once the laundry is dry, all I have to do is unhook the clips and loosen the base’s lock so that the no-longer-taut clothesline is yanked back into the case. It’s child’s play to let the line reel back into its cave, and sometimes I have a bit of fun; instead of keeping hold of the apparatus as it winds tight, I let go of the plastic strip and watch it flail around at top speed as though in a panic. But I’m always scared that the mechanism will break or the line will get tangled up, so I generally hold the reins at least until the halfway point. I’m an adult, after all.
Neapolitan Misery
The retractable clothesline is most often in repose, curled up, and therefore invisible. When it’s not, the bathroom sags under all my laundry’s weight and looks like some overloaded Neapolitan street scene. The room may fulfill its function with brio at such times, but the feeling it most clearly exudes as it disappears beneath that sopping mass is misery, a misery I would never feel if these clothes were strung from windows …
Pharmacopoeia
As in all the bathrooms in all the world, there’s a little cabinet amounting to a little pharmacy, its name evoking both remedy & poison. Positioned on the right wall, above the Vedette washing machine, this red metal box, 45 cm high and 35 cm wide, its depth fairly shallow (15 cm), is perfect for the moderate use I make of it, correlating to my quasi-pathological antipathy toward the very notion of illness. Bought at IKEA, featuring an embedded lock—a fairly useless precaution since I don’t have any children or any sticky-fingered maids—this piece of furniture delights me with its unabashed redness, a red that screams “Danger!” As Roland Barthes notes in his Lecture Course at the Collège de France, edited by my homonym, “an individual is defined by his Pharmacopoeia … a little medicine cabinet.” Having already made a similar remark about practically all my earthly possessions, and being faithful to the topographical rule that I’ve imposed upon myself in this inventory, I won’t shy away from performing such an exposition of my own interior.
In 1 part of the cabinet I store my various all-purpose products (Band-Aids, nail clippers, Q-tips, rubbing alcohol), single-use packages of soap and shampoo taken from various hotels (a legal form of plunder), protective items (earplugs, condoms, etc.), and so forth. Actual medicines are in a separate area. There aren’t very many, thanks to my general good health—I can’t help but knock on an oaken corner of my desk (→ OFFICE) as I write that. The concoctions that take shelter in this red refuge are 1st and foremost the sorts of simple thing found in an infirmary, such as aspirin and antiseptics. I don’t have many telltale medicines; what’s most telling is, again, and above all, my wholehearted defiance toward illness, toward the state of being ill, and most of all toward the overwhelming attention granted to the bedridden these days, particularly in the media, like those daily broadcast “wellness features” in which people won’t shut up about their most horrifying health scares, certain at least that they’ll be heard by their resentful compatriots who, too, have repurposed their misfortunes into reasons to live. But illness hasn’t spared me thanks to any sort of divine grace—my only gods are the household sort—and I regularly suffer from gastrointestinal distress, which has necessitated a remedy by the name of Spasfon; I even underwent an operation 7 years ago to discern the exact reason for this complaint, following the €300 recommendation of a doctor named Boboc who, finding nothing more than a diverticular lymphoid hyperplasia, a benign issue that he encouraged me to treat with some Bédélix, a small brown powder with an agreeable taste that would “solidify it all,” drove me in the end to simply tell people that I had a touch of lactose intolerance. As my 1st name rhymes, in French, with “stomach” (Thomas/ estomac—I’m afraid I do tend to put stock in coincidences like that), this tummy ache of mine has only served to convince me that ailments, all too often, are bound to their homophones—whence my reason for preferring psychiatry over conventional doctoring. The other ailments that I suffer, without any real regularity, are headaches: I have a bottle of Doliprane with a reassuringly yellow label; yellow is a color that wholly suits medicine. What I most appreciate about my pills is the objectivist poetry of their names, providing relief before I even need it: migraine sufferers swear by Doliprane’s kinship to mal au crane, a French term for headache. When I’ve had too much to drink, I wipe out my feelings of bleariness with some betaine citrate, a miracle remedy I swear by and always take on trips or before nights out since it’s especially effective when it’s taken preventatively. Deeper in my cabinet are some antifungal creams, since I sometimes get athlete’s foot, a reward for frequenting my gym, and some Pansoral (formerly Borostyrol) too, since sometimes I get canker sores, albeit not as a reward for frequenting other people’s mouths. And then I do come down with conjunctivitis from time to time, so I keep a bottle of eyewash and some saline pods in there for treating discharge: an all-too-justified judgment upon my scopophilic impulses, perhaps, interfering with the vision of a voyeur whose pseudonym could well be Peeping Tom.
Anti-Antidepressants
Despite my perennial hypochondria, my phobia of illness has managed to protect me from the full brunt of this disorder, my body’s sheer insistence on being well proving a far more powerful remedy than anybody could anticipate. Thus, if I’m not sick, it’s due as much to my mental fortitude as it is to some Nietzschean choice in favor of life; a choice, after all, that 1 can’t avoid making: for my part, if I’m obliged to suffer the illness of my neurosis, I’ve decided that I simply don’t have room for any others. My existence proceeds on the plane of magical thinking, as it were: since I have the impression that talking about an illness is the surest way to catch it, I avoid all conversation on the subject, inasmuch as this is possible, since this would otherwise and immediately plunge me into a convulsive state of disease. Still, the only kinds of medicine I’d never take are antidepressants. If absolutely necessary, I’d recommend the poetry of Pessoa or Lacan instead.
Probing the Wound
He’s in front of the mirror again. He takes a moistened Q-tip and thrusts it into a red vial. He knows that it’ll hurt, then he pulls down his lower lip and swabs the cotton tip along the gumline until he finds, in the furthest region of his jaw, the small open wound that’s been irritating him for days. He rubs in the Q-tip insistently, the gingival area swells and burns, the mucous membrane stings, an indescribable odor wafts through the dental valley. He cries, but deep within his pain he feels a tiny pleasure, and his tears wind up a bit ambiguous.
Patermysterias
Behind the door, a chrome rack from my maternal grandmother is mounted on the wall. In the golden days of my childhood, chrome signified wealth; to my adult eyes, it’s just typical of every bathroom, all the more so in the case of this particular object, 1 of the most inconspicuous in my apartment, despite its gleaming surface; I don’t take half as much pleasure in admiring its 4 wobbly pegs as I do its essential invisibility whenever I gaze upon these reflective railroad ties bound to chrome-plated tracks: nailed to the back of the door, and cloaked by all the clothes it bears, this wall rack is covered by 1 teal bathrobe as well as 1 pair of pajamas, which I don’t wear all that often. As I touch this rack, the only 1 I have—when guests give me their coats and bags, I plop them down on my bed—I can’t help but be overcome by memories of a childhood prank called patère-mystère that crops up in French versions of the Junior Woodchucks’ Guide, and never failed to get a laugh out of me: this party trick consisted of sawing off part of a wooden coatrack and swapping it with 1 decoy strip of wood that would cause all the coats to fall right to the ground. These racks being called patères in French and this impossible gadget being especially mesmerizing because of the effect it would have had on my paterfamilias, I took to calling my father patermyster, convinced that this singular man was hiding some secret from me; I didn’t understand back then, even if I did suspect it, the mystery underlying all paternity, a mystery that took on extreme forms in my childhood home: I’ve never been able to accept the idea of procreation, and I’m delighted that Malthus, a historical figure I admire (in direct proportion to the inexplicable contempt so many narrow-minded people hold for him), shares my 1st name. For me, procreation is the opposite of Venice—verbum sat, of course.
Coughrobe
The cotton bathrobe hanging from that rack somehow finds its way into all the rooms of my apartment. Its (omni)presence sometimes befuddles me … but its beauty offsets the glumness of being home sick. Whenever I do put it on, it’s for a good while: it means I’ll be home recovering for several days.
Unshareable
Since no shelves have been installed in this room, which is far too small for widespread disorder, I have no choice but to submit to its spatial constraints, which would never meet the needs of life en couple. The bathroom is the most unshareable room. Since I must be satisfied with its bareness, I adopt the spirit of the ascetic, making a virtue of necessity by way of the rhetorical figure known as hysteron proteron: not planning on coming down with a fever, I didn’t bother to get a thermometer; not intending to be disorganized, I didn’t bother to get a cabinet; not intending to develop diabetes, I didn’t buy any sugar … I don’t have x so I didn’t need y. This apartment is a totality of subtractions.
Jaunty Doorknob
The door that opens this chapter will close on it after I’ve explained that it’s made of plywood and not actual wood, a cost-cutting measure I had 0 say in because the decision preceded me. I’ve already seen ridiculous conversions undertaken to turn these hideous doors into trestle tables in cottages or garages. This shoddy excuse for a door is made less so by its doorknob from the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, a translucent handle topped by a gleaming black billiard ball. Thanks to this jaunty detail, I’m able to focus on my little doorknob to the exclusion of the big door it adorns.
Inalienable Object No. 4
Here’s the water heater, tall and stout. I had it put in while renovating and installing various other things for the exorbitant sum of ₣6,500 (€991). 1 way or another, extortion inevitably ends up tainting the technical components of my life, but the problem is especially acute whenever I interact with technicians whose expertise is so wholly superior to mine as to prove that amateurs like me can wreak as much havoc as self-satisfied bureaucrats. This white tank with a capacity of 100 liters, standing upright, eats up plenty of the bathroom’s space, completely throwing off the room’s visual equilibrium. Here is its handle, here is its spout; mounted on the wall with 2 solid (I would hope) rivets, it has to be emptied for maintenance, which I never do, thanks to a combination of ignorance, laziness, and incompetence. When it gets all backed up, hear me shout! It’s already stopped functioning once, for 17 wintry days during which I stewed without any hot water, torn between demoralization and fatalism, stoicism and a fiery desire to wipe out the working class (well, the electrical and plumbing sectors). Fortunately, 2 Portuguese emissaries saved me from carrying out this plot, and if I gloss over the €250 fine levied upon those of us incapable of replacing just 1 resistor ourselves, I can take some pride in knowing they didn’t reap any extra dividends in the end—dislodging all the built-up sediment in my Fleck-brand heater took 1.5 hours (.5 for the water to drain, 1 for the hard-water deposits to be scraped out and the resistor replaced): they said they’d never in their careers seen a water heater in such a state of internal disrepair, its reservoir corroded by 5 years of neglect. But what could I have done? Just tip it over and pour it out?
Science Fiction
Some plumbers excavating a water heater unearth the perfectly preserved memoirs of the man who invented the water heater.
Invisible Volume
Though I might, like Bernd and Hilla Becher and their singular photographs, admire the form of this industrial object, so perfectly suited to its function, I’m keener to isolate the qualities that, despite its size, are less clearly seen: or, to be more precise, that I’ve ceased to see. It’s a spatial paradox: the object taking up the most space in this room doesn’t stand out at all. Its purpose justifies its mass, which means that any attempt to hide it (with a cover, for example) would prove to be a risky operation likely drawing far more attention to the object in question than no camouflage at all would.
The Belle of the Baths
I know that my bathroom isn’t beautiful; it’s not as comfortable or spacious or reassuring or pleasant or even practical as a woman might wish. I willingly associate the bathroom (and not the kitchen) with the realm of femininity, because of the connotations of luxury, modern beauty, and gentle sophistication inherent in a particular image I hold of that sex. By contrast, my bathroom hews to a Spartan aesthetic: lacking any warmth, it exists in a perpetual winter whose only advantage is allowing me to indulge on occasion in a fantasy of being a stoic Greek soldier possessed of absolute self-control. Of course, I could always spend a little money to summon the technological goddess known as Space Heater, but—though I do pine for her!—I give her the cold shoulder.
Hot/Cold
I hope I might be permitted to draw 1 inference from this lack of heating, with which I’ll be concluding this chapter and this room: what I’d most regret would be to learn that my readers were drawing no heat from this book, that my words neither warm your heart nor chill your blood … Still, the autobiography of a home must inevitably touch on the farthest reaches of the thermal prism, cold succeeding heat, burning following freezing, each room revealing those treasures dictated by its identity. My bathroom’s lack of any sort of radiator, hardly offset by the bathtub that heats it occasionally, is full evidence of how shabby my life here really is.