Over Seas of Memory Page 4
Cheerful, always laughing, with a sharp nose and thin fingers that spin gracefully, she wears light white dresses that make it look like she is floating. She is blonde, almost white-haired, which is surprising for an Italian, but with the Bartolini Circus there is no end of surprises. She speaks, speaks a lot, mixing Italian, French, and Creole in her ringing tirades, punctuating it all with great bursts of laughter . . . She likes contrasts, provocative ideas, and audacious comparisons. In a contemporary interview, she declares that the circus was born in the eighteenth century by the coming together of two groups that society had apparently cast aside since the Middle Ages: “the descendants of the knights on the one hand, aristocrats, horsemen; and on the other, street artists and fairground people, who were the successors to the acrobats and wandering entertainers.” She calls herself at once a socialist and a Catholic, a patriot and an anarchist, freely rebellious and deliberately reactionary. Her favorite phrase, which she made the motto of the circus:
Meglio vivere un giorno de leone che mille da capra.
It is better to live one day like a lion than a thousand days as a goat . . . It was quite an agenda she set herself! In the space of a few minutes, on that day, the Bartolini lioness devoured the goat Coquillard.
Madame Bartolini’s family is a great commedia dell’arte family. For centuries they have worked in the live entertainment business. She has retained from that tradition the art of the gesture and movement and a love of music. On the circus program an operatic air accompanies every act. It is Vivaldi for the artists’ entrance, Monteverdi for the acrobatics, and Mozart for the horse riding—lots of Baroque music. But la Bartolini is equally at home in improvised dialogues and musical interludes. Buffoonery even has a place, and she has classic commedia dell’arte figures like the Pantalone, the Captain, and the Harlequin . . . She knows by heart all these easily recognizable characters, she knows each part of their act, and has an ability to see the meanings of masks and situations. Starting with only a few retorts, she can construct hundreds of different situations: it will take more than a fussy immigration officer to throw her off. She carries the blusterer away immediately in a ballet of gestures and words that almost make him lose his mind. She seduces and threatens, she uses compliments and innuendo, and maybe she even slips him discreetly a few banknotes. And then Hassan Ali himself is on the quayside, becoming impatient, waiting for his good friend and his cargo. You can’t keep flowers waiting. The immigration officer suddenly relents on his high principles, and the following day Maxime is registered.
Soon, after providing the required four identity photos (“facing the camera and with no hat,” as stated in the immigration regulations), he will be given a “definitive identity card” for a set fee of forty-five francs (which is required for all males over eighteen). He will pay it in two installments, with an impressive array of one- and two-franc stamps stuck on a card that has on the other side drawings of a dog and a bird. He gets his change in tokens from the French chamber of commerce, in aluminum bronze, and a few nickel coins for twenty-five, ten, and five centimes.
The first residence visa is valid for a year in Madagascar and its Dependencies. Maxime Ferrier was to stay there for the rest of his life.
*
Of those four photographs there remains only one, which is sitting here on the table, facing me. Maxime has very short hair, almost a shaved head, which gives him the air of a resistance fighter, a deportee, or a convict. The dark shirt sets in contrast the face, a pure luminous oval. The shirt has a Venetian collar, just as he would always wear them, with the tips broadly spread. “Chic and relaxed,” according to the Italian tailor I questioned in Venice, who added: “You see them already in Tintoret’s paintings. It is the most classical style; it crosses the centuries.”
The folds that you see shaped around the shoulders suggest the power of his thorax. Maxime looks straight ahead, almost in a hard, tough-guy way. You feel that he forced himself to look straight at the camera, and in fact, his left shoulder still leans a little to the back, as if his body resisted the image that they were assigning to it: it is as if he had a little ironic sign hidden in the shoulder. It looks like he is saying, “What do you want of me?” He is not posing for posterity; he is there, in the moment, you would not want to be in the place of the one taking the portrait—as they say—of this young ephebe with the neck of a bull.
*
To try to retrace the life of Maxime Ferrier at that time, the sources are scarce. There are three types: the circus programs—various, colorful flyers, decorated with drawings or, more rarely, with photographs; certain newspaper reviews of the time that mention in particular the incidents that pepper the circus tours; and finally, police reports that begin at the precise moment that Maxime sets foot on the Big Island and that from then were to follow him around ceaselessly. Otherwise, there are a few eyewitness accounts, which are not always reliable. I have all this in front of me, press cuttings, bits of paper, stolen words, uttered by someone else and displaced, moved around: it is up to me to make sense of it all.
Circus programs, newspaper articles, police reports . . . Bringing these three types of documents together gives a strange impression. The circus programs are full of life and color, the newspaper articles are glittery and dazzling, while the prose of the immigration officials or that of the courts is flat and repetitive. Maxime’s life slides between these three styles of writing, none of which seem able to pin him down.
And so I wander. I browse. I rummage. I spend whole weeks in a dark bedroom, or anteroom, I should say. It is like wanting to trap a ghost . . . I don’t sleep much, I write continually, morning, noon, evening, and night. Li-An passes by from time to time with a coffee. She tells me I should think about getting some rest, that I should not work so much. I think about Kafka’s phrase: “I am a memory come to life, which explains my insomnia.” All of this to trace the path of a man about whom we know little more than his name. And so, let’s speak a bit about this name . . .
*
We should try to clear up at this point a mystery, that of my own name. In fact, when Maxime arrived in Madagascar, he wasn’t called “Ferrier” but “Février.” That is in any case how his name appears in the birth register in the town of Souillac, in the Savane district of Mauritius, where he was born.
We know of many cases where migrants’ names are changed—voluntarily or otherwise—in the course of their wanderings. To emigrate is often first and foremost to change one’s name. In their Récits d’Ellis Island Georges Perec and Robert Bober recall the countless changes of family names that took place a few hundred yards from the Statue of Liberty, on the narrow sandbank at the mouth of the Hudson where were set up the services of the American Federal Bureau for Immigration and through which transited over many decades the immigrants who were to construct the United States of America: someone called Vladimir became Walter, Skyzertski became Sanders, someone from Berlin became Berliner, while Israel Baline himself was transformed into Irving Berlin . . . This little Jewish immigrant would become, a few years later, one of the greatest American musicians of all time, the composer most notably of “God Bless America”! Thus, that landing stage—a site that is sometimes referred to as the “terminal”—becomes for certain people a point of departure, a new beginning.
The following anecdote is the best known. It is once again Perec, who is, alongside Proust, the greatest twentieth-century French writer on the theme of memory, who tells the story: “They were telling an old Russian Jewish man to choose a good American name that the registrar would have no trouble in transcribing. He asked an employee in the luggage hall for a suggestion—the name proposed was Rockefeller. The old Jewish man repeated several times Rockefeller, Rockefeller so that he would not forget it. But when, several hours later, the official asked his name, he had forgotten it, and replied, in Yiddish, ‘Schon vergessen,’ which means ‘I have already forgotten,’ and it was thus that he was recorded under the good American name of John Ferguso
n.”
The transformation of Février into Ferrier is of a slightly different kind, but it is just as instructive. On this transformation there are several versions going around, as if the simple shift of a single letter had itself opened up an endless round of commentaries and different accounts.
Some people talk of a simple writing error, during the recording of the civil status, between the v of Février and the r of Ferrier. The movement is more or less the same, and the hand can easily stray. Others bring up his status as a runaway and explain the name change by his wish to cover his tracks. But could the simple change of one letter fool anyone? Curiously, they don’t give much credence to the explanation of the man himself, Maxime . . . Asked a few years later on his name change, he replied calmly: “There is no way I could have gone by the name of the shortest month of the year!”
What a strange joke to crack, and people generally put it down to his sarcastic side. As for me, I see in it the most pertinent and profound reply, in its very impertinence. Apart from its symbolic weight—which is quite simply that of a baptism, Maxime like Moses changing his name as they came out of the waters—the change from Février to Ferrier is also a neat way to write oneself out of the human calendar and its fixed temporality. By thus forging his own name and giving it a certain density (fer in French means “iron”), Maxime changes age and epoch, he breaks the biological chain and finds himself anew, the only one to carry his name, joyful, alive, filled with new life and a new experience of time.
The stories related to migrants’ names are by turn comical and ridiculous, anecdotal or pathetic, and quite often moving. They are never insignificant. At Ellis Island, as Perec again recalls, “destiny came in the shape of the alphabet.” A whole series of letters written in chalk on the shoulders of the new arrivals decided their destiny, their supposed illnesses and infirmities: C for tuberculosis, K for a hernia, L for lameness, TC for trachoma, X for mental debility . . . At the same time, on the other side of the world, a man all on his own reversed this logic and, by means of a simple change of letter—a delicate, fragile, spirited gesture—chose to give himself, by way of the alphabet, his own true freedom.
*
A man leaving: the fissure in the wall, the rip in the cloth. What grace but also what violence in that life . . . To leave, to throw everything up in the air. Above all, to never come back, to depart without leaving anything behind. To break free from the hypnosis, the sleepwalk of mechanical routines, to take leave of the horology of death . . .
There is a degree of cruelty, of course, in this border crossing. For example, leaving his mother to die alone, over there, in a forgotten little place, in order to know everything about the crime of existence. Maxime, who was seventeen years old when he left, was never to see his mother again.
Also, to take on his name fully, to forge it—a single letter to free himself—to carry it, export it, import it, impose it . . . It’s the grand gesture of all migrations, their secret motivation: to at once forget and affirm one’s name.
Migrate and multiply . . . Migrations are a “displacement of parasitical individuals in the course of their metamorphosis,” according to the lexicographer Bouillet in the Dictionnaire universel d’histoire et de géographie, in his very nineteenth-century style . . . Today there are reduced, miserabilist visions of migration: they emphasize political dangers, wars, economic constraints. The stories told about the immigrants themselves often insist on sadness and nostalgia. And yet there is also the joy of leaving, the great unfurling that the departure opens up to the imagination and memory . . . One cannot understand anything about migrations without a little musical sense, of canons, stretti, and response . . . The freedom of the fugue, the art of improvisation . . . All these passing people, these oblique people . . . They undo fusions and collections; they play dissensions against recensions and slip, musically, into the spaces in between.
It has always been the same, in fact, since the dawn of time. Since the Greeks, since Homer, the Africans, since the black man who stood up in the Great Rift Valley, the Jew who dragged himself out of his slave plot . . . Suddenly, there is nothing that hangs on to you or blocks the way, nothing to hold you there. Arthur, Maxime, Madame Bartolini . . . Each one of them with their own history, trajectory, their own style like a projectile.
Every departure is accompanied by a sense of clarity. To leave, leave far away, to lose oneself in order to find oneself, to pass by or through the other to free yourself, the great dive into the abyss and the release that you had dreamed of . . . The novel is finally nothing but a means of finding again this rhythm, breathing freely, rediscovering acrobatic memory and sharpened perception.
*
Who is Maxime Ferrier? Why did the Bartolini Circus, stopping over at Mahajanga, never leave the island again? What became of Madame Bartolini and Arthur Dai Zong? How was Maxime able to become so rich in so little time and then lose everything in the space of a few years? Why did he have three almost identical tombs made in that old cemetery on the Corniche? Who is in the third grave? And what is the meaning of that enigmatic epitaph inscribed into the stone on Maxime’s tomb?
So that it may be living and not destroyed . . .
Memory is like the sea, obscure and full of the bitterness of algae. Certain traces are lost, buried, or indeed vanished. Others remain, but they don’t speak to us, or only vaguely, confusedly, like the murmur of the ocean that you don’t quite know if it is coming toward you or slipping away into nothing.
There are many obscure, hidden parts to this story. You have to search, go back to the archives and eyewitness accounts, go down in the libraries and the cellars, check everything, even in the police stations. And then you have to sift through all these boxes of old newspapers, photographs, and leaflets. I need to understand who these people are; they are so close to and yet so far from me. I need to return to their lives, to how their days played out and the silence of their nights, so that I might find it all again, right down to the accent, the very tone of their voices.
For that I need to leave, leave again—and it is thus that I feel, already, the imprint that they have left in me, the movement that they impress upon my life from the depths of their tombs, like an immense ascent of time itself.
Next stop, then: Madagascar.
France and Its Offshoots
— Oh!
— What? What’s up?
— Oh!
— What now?
— Listen!
— More of your newspapers? Oh no.
— But yes, listen.
— No.
— Twenty lines.
— No.
— Ten.
— Nothing. Why don’t you just come to the beach with me?
— We’ll go later. But you are wrong . . . It’s worth hearing this.
— I feel sorry for you.
— Why?
— You’re like a rag-and-bone man.
— How do you mean?
— You are shuffling around this mass of papers, newspapers, letters, and notebooks as if you were rummaging through a basket of peelings. It’s all so random . . . Do you think that helps understand anything?
— Absolutely.
— And you are suffocated by the whole thing!
— With joy.
— Ok, if you insist. Go ahead, then . . .
— Listen: “Will the fear of politicians to undermine the bases of a weakened national identity, the taboos of the collective unconscious, the lack of motivation in the universities, the routine nature of scholarly programs, and the interests of textbook publishers conspire again to kill at birth the interrogation of the anachronistic configuration of national historiography? All of the histories fabricated in the nineteenth century to celebrate the emerging nation-states have more or less erased any stains on their reputations. But the intellectual context and the ideological project that have conditioned the construction of a History of France from its origins to the present day, made official and transm
itted by the education system of the Third Republic, are key to understanding today’s malaise concerning questions of identity. Republican historians, who saw France as the light of the world, as a messiah nation, drew up an outline of the past that was intended to nationalize the French people and forge their patriotism. The historical narrative instilled into the imaginary an idea of France as homogeneous, one, indivisible, a metahistorical essence mysteriously present in an originary mythical Gaul. This narrative ignored the mix of peoples and cultures that in fact was at the very heart of the geopolitical space forged in the aftermath of the Capetian conquests and annexations.”
— A multicultural France? . . . Who would have thought? And why not multilingual too, while we are at it? You are joking?
— Not at all. Listen to the final part: “Invented for and transmitted by the education system of the Third Republic, our multicultural and multiethnic history must be rewritten in today’s France, a post-Vichy, postcolonial France, tied to the heart of Europe, an integral part of the complexity of the world in the twenty-first century.”
There it is, written by Suzanne Citron, a nice name that makes you think at once of crepes and fruit, of sweetness and elegance.
*
The French don’t know where to put me. We don’t have any idea of how to be French in that way, they say to me. It’s too complicated, all your mixed parts! What a joke . . . The French are united only when under attack—and even then it doesn’t last long, you only have to see how they are at each other’s throats afterward. Français de souche, as they say, where souche means literally “stump,” as if there were no other way to be “truly” French . . . Anyway, what is a stump but a piece of dead wood, a tree trunk with no depth, an amputated limb?
In Molière’s play L’École des femmes Mr. Stump is Arnolphe, a bourgeois gentleman who took his aristocratic name from a rotten old tree trunk on his little farm: Monsieur de la Souche. It is written there in black and white, from the first scene. The only women he likes are ugly and stupid. And people want to make of this some kind of example for France?