From Beneath You’ll Breathe the Roses (The Last Visit with Ernest Breleur)

WE WERE DRINKING WHITE RUM WITH BROWN SUGAR, as we always did; the canvases were on the floor, many canvases from the past several years. But that day I was concentrating on a few very recent paintings, leaning against the wall, which I was seeing for the first time and which differed from the previous works in the predominance of the color white. I asked, “Is that always death everywhere?” “Yes,” he said.

In previous periods naked headless bodies soared, while down below small dogs wept in an endless night. Those nocturnal pictures I had thought were inspired by the past of slaves for whom night was the only time life was free. “So with your white paintings, has the night finally left?” “No. It’s still night,” he said. Then I understood: night had merely turned its shirt inside out. It was a night eternally set ablaze by the beyond.

He explained that in the early phase of the work, the canvas is highly colored, then gradually, white drippings like a curtain of fine threads, like rainfall, came to cover the painting. I said, “Angels visit your studio at night and piss white urine over your paintings.”

One picture I stared at again and again: at the left an open door, in the middle a horizontal body floated as if it were coming out of a house. Below, at the right, a hat set down. I understood: it was not the door of a house but the entrance to a tomb, the sort you see in Martinique cemeteries: little houses of white tile.

I looked at that hat at the bottom, so surprising at the edge of the tomb. Was it the incongruous presence of an object, in the Surrealist manner? The night before, I had gone to visit Hubert, another Martinican friend. He showed me a hat, the big beautiful hat of his long-dead father: “The hat, the memento that eldest boys here inherit from their fathers,” he had explained.

And the roses. They floated around the gliding corpse or grew out of it. Suddenly some lines sprang into my head, verses I had marveled at when I was very young, the Czech verses of František Halas:

From below you’ll breathe the roses

When you live your death

And in the night you’ll throw off

Love your shield.

And I saw my native land, that land of Baroque churches, of Baroque cemeteries, of Baroque statues, with its obsession with death, its obsession with the departing body that no longer belongs to the living but that, even decomposed, goes on being a body, thus an object of love, of tenderness, of desire. And I saw before me the Africa of yesteryear and the Bohemia of yesteryear, a little village of Negroes and Pascal’s infinite space, Surrealism and the Baroque, Halas and Césaire, urinating angels and weeping dogs, my own home and my elsewhere.