In the basement I dreamed a great deal. In one dream I was a child, and the city I lived in was a harbor town. An orphan has no right to hide. Look, look, look at her! How cute! How thin! How sweet! How sickly! Hair like a bird’s nest, legs like brown asparagus! Look, look, look at her! This girl has been abandoned, she is free—free to anyone who wants her!
Only in the darkness of the movie theater was I protected from the eyes of others. My cinema was a “Ma,” she wrapped me in her mucous membranes. She shielded me from the sun, from the force of visibility. Life was being played out on the screen, a life before death. People fought there, or else slept together. They cried and sweated, and the screen remained dry. The cinema, its stage, had no depth, but it did have its own light source.
Your name is Marie and this time you aren’t a prostitute—you’re a professor of philosophy. With a book in your hand you speak to the students in the lecture hall. The microphone inclines toward your mouth like an insectivore. The lecture hall is packed to bursting; the students sit shoulder to shoulder. One is constantly moving his pen, another is trying to shake the pebbles out of his brain, a third is observing the speaker’s beauty with dreamy eyes.
I envied these students, and my old dream occurred to me once more: I wanted to study at the university, to study philosophy, something I had wanted to do even back before I learned to blow my own nose properly.
Instead of studying, I wandered around the city all day long: no roof over my head, illegal and unemployed, a mute creature devoid of language skills, unwashed and lethargic. In the rue des Écoles I discovered a book by Plato in a shop window. I didn’t know anything about him, but his name had been familiar to me since childhood. A school friend whose parents owned a pension in Saigon once gave me the paperback edition of The Symposium, which one of the French guests had left behind in a room. I put the book on my desk and looked at the title every day. “Le banquet”—I knew exactly what the word meant, and imagined a large ballroom with chandeliers. Translucent noodles, red prawns, bean sprouts, cilantro, and lemongrass were spread across a large, round table. Delicacies in the shape of rolls and little balls filled white porcelain bowls and large silver platters. A ball, a huge ball the size of my head or even bigger keeps growing, a dangerous ball. Suddenly a chef appears and slices the ball in two with his knife.
A few women wore traditional dresses, áo dài of supple silk, while others wore elegant French evening gowns. They circled about, moving from one point to another as if dancing a ronde whenever they wished to find new conversation partners or wineglasses. That was the banquet, and I wasn’t there; I was standing outside in the street, the light of the chandeliers was seeping through the window, casting my shadow on the paving stones.
I couldn’t follow your lecture. All I recognized was the word “aggression.” Aggression, agronomy, agricultural technology—an uncle of mine had studied agricultural technology in the GDR—culture, agriculture, angry, agreement. I had always thought I couldn’t speak a word of English, but I had only imagined this. A soldier once asked me on the street in Saigon: “Do you agree with me?” I was just a child. Should I agree with my not being invited to the banquet and remain docile, or should I fly into a rage and smash the ballroom window?
I knew the word “aggression” because it was one of the French words Ai Van sometimes used to incorporate into her Vietnamese sentences. I rarely thought of Ai Van, but this word brought her voice back to my ear.
Juliette doesn’t look like a student, but she is studying at the university. She is taking one of Marie’s classes. Someone must have told her where to get an application form, how to pay the tuition fees, which books to read, and with what casualness or reserve one speaks with the professors.
Juliette, a wildcat in heat, takes a bottle of perfume from a shelf, quickly puts it in her handbag and leaves the shop without paying. Juliette is being dragged off by three policemen; she’s biting their hands, juicy police hands, smoked male hands, crunchy meaty hands. Juliette thrashes around on all fours on the floor, the three policemen trying to hold her down. While the sympathetic policeman Alex is interrogating her, she observes him with the intelligence of an untamed beast, calculating her chances of survival down to the last millimeter. She asks him for a cigarette—an impertinent, flirtatious request as she knows perfectly well the man feels drawn to her. He takes care of the formalities and the wildcat is free to go. “Do you really want to let her go?” one of his colleagues asks in surprise. “Yes, let her go,” he replies.
Alex, the little brother of a car dealer who works at night, Alex, the son of an important Mafia boss, Alex, the ascetic policeman who hates criminals, not because he’s Catholic but because he hates his brother.
Juliette lies in wait for Alex. He ignores her and gets into his car. Juliette quickly slips in through the other door and sits down in the passenger seat. Alex reaches for the gear shift, and she reaches for his trousers and the object within them. His eyes are like the eyes of a hare looking down the black hole of a rifle barrel. An exchange of words between them like an exchange of money, one bad currency in exchange for another. Then the two are already in a bedroom. In a film one can land in bed so quickly. Out the window one sees a bit of suburban landscape with highway signs. Juliette is wearing a summer dress, Alex a white shirt—only from the waist down are they naked. They have sex with powerful thrusts, a painful, frantic coupling full of rage. They do not fully undress, they do not kiss, they do not smile, caress one another, or speak. A cockfight of the sexual organs, pure, unadulterated intercourse with no gourmet digressions, as if they’d both confessed to being nothing more than pure, holy, sexual beings.
Juliette is sitting with Marie in the bathtub, smiling like a helpless girl. In warm water, bodies forget all the constraints of buttons, elastic bands, belts, and zippers. The two bodies lose their contours, dissolve. They are no longer touching, though they are still connected through the element of water. Water: the language of the unconstrained.
Juliette turns her back to Marie. Marie’s hands embrace Juliette from behind. Marie takes the showerhead and rinses Juliette’s hair. A baptism for a nameless religion without beliefs. Juliette shuts her eyes and luxuriates in the warm flowing-away that leaves nothing behind. She believes in nothing.
It wasn’t the first time your name was Marie. You revived the girl in the bathtub. This is the same bathtub in which you once, as Carol, laid the corpse of the man you had murdered.
Juliette is surrounded by many male eyes. The eyes of the policeman Alex are windowpanes made of frozen tears; the eyes of his brother are glasses filled with golden whiskey. This brother knows how to transport money from another pocket to his own, never the other way around. His suit is made of soft fabric, sumptuous permanent press, his neckties are flowery, his men jump to open the door for him. I have everything I take everything I have you and many other women I have money I give you a lot of this money I give you not everything but many of the many things you stay here you cannot leave you know too much you must come deeper inside until you can no longer return.
I heard the word projet several times from Marie's lips. The word “love,” on the other hand, could almost never be heard, although I knew this word in French. Most likely it had gotten buried in compounds with other words. The project existed all alone. A project is a promise, a sketch for a house that can be lived in, to which one can invite ones friends. How different I would have been if I’d had a project. But a creature of the streets has no project—always only the selfsame activity that is monotonously repeated. Marie suggests a project to Juliette, a joyful, intelligent project that transforms an alley into the Milky Way. Juliette doesn’t seem too interested.
Juliette puts on her black leather jacket. It smells of criminality. The criminal is a smell, a whisper in the dark, a hiding, a made-up name, an insomniac nervous system, a knife, an endless list of names in one’s head, a running away, a mixed feeling of fear and sentimentality created by the sight of the faint reflection of lights on the train tracks at night. Criminality is my smell.
Juliette puts on her black leather jacket. The leather gleams like the night, the night in which one of the men cuts through a chain with bolt cutters. The gate to the lot provides access to the freight trains loaded with new cars. With practiced hands, the men remove the wedges from beneath the car tires. Then two guards appear and shine a flashlight in Juliette’s face. Juliette raises both hands and freezes. The guards hold their pistols pointed at her and slowly approach. Suddenly a shot is heard, and a shootout begins. Juliette jumps out of the car and throws herself down. One of the guards falls, the other manages to escape. The boss is on the ground, covered in blood. Juliette looks at him; he cannot get up on his own.
A bell rings, Marie opens the door, and there is Juliette, her face half cut off by the door, Marie's lips move toward Juliette’s lips, Juliette refuses, utters angry words and drinks bitter red wine while Marie continues to fuss over her and speak about a meaningful project, projects are always meaningful, Marie tries to encourage Juliette, console her, love her, but Juliette turns away, Marie falls silent, Juliette smashes her wine glass against the edge of the sink, her lips eat the shards of glass, bloody lips, a sliced-up tongue, she drinks the splinters, she drinks death, Marie rushes to her side, uses force to open her bloody mouth, removes the shards of glass, the wildcat bites Marie's fingers, she screams but her fingers don’t stop, Marie’s white sweater is red with blood, shards fall to the floor, tears, an embrace, cut.
You carry around a small, flat container everywhere you go. You don’t swallow shards of glass, but you do swallow a golden liquid and white pills. You swallow and drink and throw up. If things go on like this, you will one day arrive at the square called “Place Vendôme.” But of course this isn’t you it’s a role you’re playing, I know this. Who is it if it isn’t you? If a woman lives in me, she cannot be simply a Marie or a Marianne. Who is she?
Alex invites Marie to dinner and cooks for her, places flowers on the table. Juliette has vanished since the incident at the freight depot. Alex pours his guest a glass of red wine, they talk and laugh. The bottle is empty. Marie faints. Alex tends to her after snapping a picture of the sleeping beauty. This holy image remains in his room, just as I keep a photo of you beside my bed. All of us worship Marie the Holy One.
Alex was already in love with you once before, in another movie, though at that time he was still your brother. Actors have to lose their memories after every film. They forget what they used to be and think the audience has forgotten too.
There is a story about a girl who lost her parents and brother during the Vietnam War. The parents died. The girl was raised by one family and never learned that her brother was still alive and growing up in another family. The girl became a woman, met a man and married him. They had two children. One day as the couple was taking a bath together, the man began speaking of his earliest childhood memory. The woman turned pale, ran out of the bathroom, left the house and never returned.
This episode has nothing to do with the film. It just occurred to me at this moment.
When I imagined having a love affair with my brother, I immediately felt sick to my stomach as if I’d contracted fever from poisonous insect stings.
Marie is gone, possibly dead. She left behind a yellow parcel. “La poste” is stamped on a cardboard box one can buy at any post office. The post office continues to exist after the movie is over, and even after we are dead—undeliverable packages will still be stored there. Marie’s package contains a notebook belonging to her and cassettes with Juliette’s voice on them.
Juliette flees to a harbor town and finds a job at a bookstore. Alex drives there and goes into the shop but hides behind a bookshelf. Juliette has changed. Now she is a woman who wakes up each morning at the same time and drinks coffee from the same cup. She no longer sleeps with policemen, no longer takes baths with her professor, no longer steals perfume. Alex leaves the shop without speaking to her.
If I had visited Juliette, I would have taken all the Plato books off the shelves and thrown them at her. Why didn’t you come to the banquet? Why did you abandon Marie? What has become of the wildcat scent? Where is the thinking water? What’s the point of this final scene? Where should we send the cassettes?
Two women have become one, and once more you were the one who vanished.
Fortunately the other Marie hadn’t gone missing. Thanks to Marie, the raw skin of my emotions became somewhat smoother every day. The pedestrians I saw on the street were broken gramophones, the city itself an unsuccessful film, but I went on sleeping in the basement and living in the movie theaters.
Marie told me she was receiving unemployment benefits. She also worked as a custodian in public spaces and was even able to save some of her earnings. “I always took my work seriously,” she said, laughing at the word “work.” I, on the other hand, was a baby chick that sat at home waiting for food. Marie fed me and gave me pocket money and said I should go to the movies. I thought: things can’t go on like this, but I didn’t know how to earn money. It no longer frightened me to be alone in the basement since my skin was taking on a color similar to its walls. Even the pressure and heat swirling inside my head no longer bothered me.
I convinced myself that I would have to concentrate my energies before I could take the next step. I had put prison and the hospital behind me. Now I had the right to enjoy the exalted state of convalescence. A dignified gleam illuminated this basement hole thanks to the name Marie.
On nights when Marie didn’t return to the basement, I consorted in my head with policeman Alex. Following Juliette’s example, I greedily summoned all my memories of this utilizable pain, every scrap. I felt a mild ache, particularly when I thought of how the policeman could be such a dog. Like Juliette, I was in search of unadulterated contact between organs, a contact free of longing, for you were the one and only object of my passion. Of course I was unworthy of making your acquaintance. The very thought of standing before you filled me with shame. Perhaps Juliette had felt much the same thing. Of all the men around her, she didn’t love a single one—she loved only something that was embodied by Marie. Juliette, though, felt like a piece of garbage in her presence. In school I had learned that one should not let oneself be governed by false modesty, but in this case nothing else was possible. And anyway, even though it was unbearable to feel smaller and smaller when compared to you, it was also a pleasure. It was at most as a dog that I would be able to remain by your side. The sum total of happiness Juliette would derive from her new profession as a bookseller and the family she would eventually start could not surpass the happiness of this dog.
But not every dog can be so lucky. Would I even be chosen by you if I were a dog? What sort of dog should I become? How could I become a dog? There was a film where you play the role of a dog for a while. Or more precisely: you play the role of a woman who’s playing a dog. Unfortunately I never saw this film. Therefore I couldn’t learn from it. When it was drizzling, I would think a great deal about living as a dog. When the skies were clear, my opinion would quickly change, and then it would seem that perhaps it would be better to study at the university.