«... On top of that they complain, on top of that they demand a better life ... And, meanwhile, all this food thrown on the floors!». I bent my knees and dug my hand into the jumble of damp leaves and roots. I caught two lemons from the box; one had slightly blemished skin, but the other was as fresh as if it had fallen there straight from the lemon tree. "Throw fruit intact! It is clear, the apprehensive Parisian consumer will not overlook a few imperfect lemons ... Civilization is spoiling them all! ... ».
However, he hadn't had time to spoil me, who was digging his hand unapologetically into the greengrocer waste box. (…) The money brought from America had long since disappeared. Pathologically proud, I supported myself on my writer's fees. Compared to my own, the alleged hardships of Miller and Hemingway seemed almost enviable. Those bastards could afford to spend idle hours in cafes and restaurants… Fortunately, he lacked the self-pity to despair. (…)
That winter my contempt for mankind took on an intensity that I had never known before or since. She had managed to publish a book that ended with the phrase: “I shit on all of you, you fucking sons of bitches! Fuck you! Fuck everyone. The book went on sale on November 23. Reviews were scheduled to appear in Le Monde , L'Express and Le Matin . Morning after morning, I ran downstairs to buy the press, but I never found any mention of my book in those newspapers. (…) The most characteristic feature of my life at that time was that I had stopped interacting with people, except for an occasional meeting with the employees of the Ramsay publishing house. I spent September, October and November in perfectly aseptic solitude. The truth is that I have always been prone to a certain extremism. I belong to that kind of person who, from one day to the next, substitutes the brothel for the monastery. Neither my social life nor my sex life has ever been normal or sensible. However, something told me that at that time I had gone too far ... Deprived of other relationships, I turned my thoughts completely on the girl with the long hair. On December 3, I found myself speaking to myself in English, out loud. Unfolded, he deliberated on the question of "that kind of girls," that is, of prostitutes. He disagreed with the criterion that he had held up to then, according to which prostitution is a profession like any other.
Prisoner of an irrational mysticism, I stammered something about the suffocating smell emitted by the hair of the girl above. When I woke up (or when we woke up; it was not my first experience of unfolding, it had happened to me on some other occasion), I found myself sitting in front of the flimsy study door, in the middle of a cold air current that filtered underneath, I watch for your steps on the stairs. You may wonder what the girl with the long hair has to do with prostitution. The fact is that I had the suspicion that that girl was of the trade. My hypothesis was based on the unusualness of their schedules. While all the neighbors on the top floor, those from the chambres de bonnes , jumped down the stairs first thing in the morning, the girl never came down before eleven o'clock. My argument was irrefutable: there was no job on the planet or studies of any kind that could start at noon. That pale, excessively powdered face and the thick crimson that covered her lips seemed to confirm my suspicions.
A man who has just sold the book in which he declares his love for the woman in his life in writing cannot allow himself to immediately blurt out to that same woman: “Get your things, we're going home! Nine hundred francs a day for a hotel room, when my study costs thirteen hundred francs a month!… ».
My conviction remained unshaken, despite the fact that the little face showed no signs of the kind of accessible lust that the priestesses of the rue Saint-Denis usually bear with dignity . What I perceived in that face had more to do with a Baudelairian vice, that of Las flores del mal , urban and morbid. On December 4 I managed to see her pass through the half-open door and I took to the street with the intention of following her. She hurried along Rambuteau, past the Center Pompidou, and onto Boulevard Sébastopol. Victorious, I began to chant: " Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise ...", while I waited to see her cross the boulevard and take her corresponding corner on rue Saint-Denis. But she kept walking, up the boulevard. I followed her for about ten minutes, keeping an eye on her narrow, slim back, covered by a tight sheepskin coat that reached down to her heels. Suddenly, she entered the portal of a building of a certain height. I didn't go after her to avoid detection; I waited a while, which ruined my inexperienced detective activities. The list of residents included a dozen organizations spread over more than ten floors. Who knew where he had been and who he would have gone to visit. And if he was there to type something or to make love to someone. The most suspicious was a certain Polish society of liberal professionals, located on the sixth right. But I could not find a way to link the two suspicions: what would it have to do with "my girl" having directed his steps to Polish society with her alleged prostitution? She did not look at all like your typical big, rude blonde, which was how I imagined Polish women.
On the morning of December 10, with my passion for the girl upstairs in full swing, the phone rang. Each phone call was an extraordinary event for me, although hearing them did not make me particularly excited, but scared. I had to give my cock a break, which I was dedicating myself to stroking while thinking about the girl with the long hair, and I crawled out of the owner's quilt. The phone cord was too short, so I squatted to the side to answer. I let it ring a bit, trying to guess the identity of my interlocutor. Was it possible that the girl with the long hair had found my number and was now trying to locate me?
But no, it was not my newborn and cautious love, but an old nightmare, my ex-wife, calling me from Rome. Ed! Something horrible has happened! John Lennon has been assassinated! ' In a matter of seconds, before the drowsiness of the dream passed, I was invaded by anger. He had heated the study as God intended the night before, thanks to logs found under a pile of rubble, and the purple embers still glowed in the fireplace, amid the ashes. And despite the relatively idyllic setting, my ex had managed to put me on the wrong side.
"Fuck your John Lennon." And your Yoko Ono, that Japanese whore. It is well used ...
-What do you say?! Crazy! You are crazy! John Lennon was shot by a maniac outside the Dakota Building at the corner of Central Park and 72nd. Open your eyes, sick, I'm talking about John Lennon. An entire generation has lost its leader.
"I never liked the clan that caramelized Beatles ... Do you want me to drool watching how four greedy proletarians get packed?" In your case, yes, it is normal: you are as hypocritical as they are.
"Hey, you're going over the edge…" she told me, back in Rome.
"It is my right ..." I said, in Paris.
"I never liked the clan that caramelized Beatles ... Do you want me to drool watching how four greedy proletarians get packed?"
Yelena knew perfectly well, she knew it was my right. Our attempt to get back together after several years apart (she now had a legitimate husband, in Rome) had failed. Her fault. She was scared once again. At the end of May, I had planted myself in Paris with a couple of suitcases and the purpose of starting a new life. For the umpteenth time, my publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, had declared bankruptcy, so the contract he and I had signed was dead paper. I rushed from New York to Paris for the sole purpose of saving the book. He was willing to promote it, even if he had to wield a machine gun to do so. (So I wrote it down in my journal at the time). Yelena appeared in Paris with eight suitcases and with her gordon setter , or gordon setter , whatever they are called; in any case, she was a lost idiot dog. But not with the intention of starting a new life with me, as I had supposed, but to live another "exciting adventure", a purpose for which she was equipped with a significant number of outfits. I wanted to experience what it would be like to live with a first-time writer in Paris. And the husband? Well, it must be admitted that the count was very tactful. She never objected to her trips to Paris and New York. He was so tactful that in his letters he warned her without fail of the exact date and time when he would call her on the phone!… But Yelena would soon realize that her predictions about the life of a writer in the early days of their career was somewhat misguided.
He did not like my study, which looked like a tram, lit only at the front, while the rear was dark. He also didn't like the stale smell of Mademoiselle No.'s rags and furniture . He loathed the noisy electric toilet, which flushed shit down a narrow brass tube into the wide sewer pipes. That motorized prodigy of French plumbing would get stuck as soon as you threw a sheet of toilet paper there. And he was disgusted with my half-length bathtub, in which shit emerged, mine or his, every time we got confused about the toilet paper in the toilet. How awful! Her husband had a noble title, she had another noble title, and you see what things are, now she had to deal with such a toilet and bathtub! Women lose their asses over books that tell of famous writers' first steps in Paris. The shit that bubbles up out of the hole in the bathtub looks very romantic in the books. It is a different thing to have to sit your own ass in a bathtub like that, no matter how much we have thoroughly scrubbed it before ... The horror! Of course, he liked the fireplace. The fireplace had been incorporated into the romantic tradition as an essential attribute of the needy lives of poets and artists.
(…) We didn't have time to make a fuss: in July she flew to Great Britain accompanied by her aristocratic husband and left half of her suitcases stored in my study. She simply accused me of being filthy and miserable, while we said goodbye… In August, she called me to inform me that she was in Paris, at the Hotel Tremoille. I sent it all to hell and took a taxi to see her. Beautiful as a teenager, she paced the hotel lobby, wearing a straw hat adorned with flowers. We rush into each other's arms and rush up to her room to fornicate. Later, in the restaurant, I learned that I would be the one to pay for her stay at the Tremoille. Illusive of me, I had sent her a postcard in which I bragged about the new contract I had signed with Pauvert and the Ramsay publishing house, twice as much as the first.
A man who has just sold the book in which he declares his love for the woman in his life in writing cannot allow himself to immediately blurt out to that same woman: “Get your things, we're going home! Nine hundred francs a day for a hotel room, when my study costs thirteen hundred francs a month!… ». It was only after four days that I managed to drag the moody aristocrat with me to the rue des Archives. Each one of the five hundred bills that I had to pile up in front of the ruddy face of the hotel cashier reminded me of a huge basket of food, meats that would have been enough to cover the needs of my stomach for a few months ... A week later, we engaged in a violent discussion; He threw a bowl full of cherries and the English-French dictionary at me and, to my great relief, left the rue des Archives. In the meager environment of the two beds in my study, in horizontal or semi-horizontal position, we lived together divinely, but as soon as we left the beds, disagreements and fights broke out. After that, he didn't call me all fall. And just now they had to assassinate John Lennon.
"I envy him," I said. What could be expected of a guy like him, at this point? Watch him grow old, swell like a boar, Elvis-style? They better have it liquidated, so we won't have to witness its decline. I would like to be shot when I have written all that I have left to write. Objectively speaking, we would have to thank the kind young man who has taken it ...
"You have no respect for anything," he murmured.
Eduard Limónov , Russian writer and politician (1943-2020), is the author of Historia de un server (Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 1991) , Historia de un rogue (Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 1993) , Soy yo, Édichka (Marbot Ediciones, 2014) and The Book of Waters (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2019). This is a fragment of one of the eight stories collected in El hombre sin amor , published by Fulgencio Pimentel on August 24 with translations by Tania Mikhelson and Alfonso Martínez Galilea.