Just Above My Head Read online

  He sips his whisky, watching Guy.

  “I met you all in America, working for you. And every single one of you call me nigger, me and my mamma and my daddy and my brother and my sister and my daughter and my son. So I don’t really give a shit what you think about France or Germany or Switzerland or England—the differences between you are not important. Whenever you think I’m getting out of hand, you can forget your differences long enough to come and kick my ass. That may not be all I know about you, and I hope that ain’t all there is to you, but, baby, that’s what I’ve learned about you, and that’s enough.”

  He takes another swallow of his whisky, and lights a cigarette. Now he cannot read Guy’s face.

  “And—this is all I got to say—I told you I was going to ask you something, this is what I want to ask you—don’t you think, on top of all the other shit I got to go through, that I might think it a little excessive that I got to give you my sympathy, too? Shit, you still got all the gold and diamonds and all the jet bombers, and my ass, and you want to cry in my arms, too? Come on, man, there’s got to be a limit.”

  He starts laughing, because Guy has thrown back his head, and is shaking with laughter.

  He sits up, drawing on his cigarette, his eyes wet.

  He picks up his whisky, puts it down, finds a handkerchief, and wipes his eyes.

  Then he looks at Arthur.

  “Chapeau. I have never heard it put so before. Sympathy!” He laughs again. “I agree, that is somewhat excessive, as you say.” He sobers, not without some difficulty. “But yes, sympathy is needed, there is no other hope.” He finally manages to take a swallow of his whisky. “I, in fact, do not have the jet bombers and so forth, and, after all, if I have your ass, you also have mine, which may entitle me to a little sympathy.” He sobers again. “But I do not joke. I am paying for something which I do not have and certainly do not want. I do not want a slave, I do not want a colony, I want to be your friend, I want you to look on me as a man like you. That is true, I think you know that. It is true that I am French, and what you say about Europe is true—I can see that. But I have never called you nigger, I do not think that it is in me to do so. Of course, you may not believe me. It is perfectly possible that you cannot afford to believe me.” He looks down. “Perhaps so brutal a history can produce only a brute. But I do not believe that, and you do not believe it, either. All history is brutal. I think”—now very earnest, lighting another cigarette, frowning, looking down—“I think that my history has made me a bankrupt in all but the material sense, and will soon make me a bankrupt in that sense, also, and it is not your sympathy, not even your love, which can save me from that mathematic. I am not clinging to my history; my history is clinging to me. My history has told too many lies about too much, has blasphemed what is sacred. I am far from being unaware of that. I know why we needed Africa, and it was not merely for the gold and the diamonds! That was the lie we told ourselves: because we were civilized.” He pauses again, and finishes his whisky. “We had to be. It is a miracle that any one of us can even fart, much less shit.” He looks at his glass, wonderingly, then at Arthur. “In spite of all appearances, cher chanteur sauvage, you are not the victim. You have been the object of a conspiracy, and the conspiracy has failed.”

  He watches Arthur with a weary, affectionate smile. “I know, in any case, no matter what you say, that you will never abandon anyone you love. And that is enough.” He puts out his cigarette, lights another, a little shy now. “I am drunk enough, just a little, to have one more drink”—he looks at Arthur—“will you join me? And, then, we will go someplace and eat and maybe you will sing for me, later? Out of sympathy.” And he laughs a very moving laugh. “Ah. I am very glad we talked.”

  Arthur watches him, and signals for the waiter. “Baby. So am I.”

  They leave the café, and continue walking down the avenue. Both are beginning to be hungry, and it is beginning to be cold, but they feel, for the moment, a need to walk together. The pretext, though they do not really need one, is that Guy wants to walk a little, to clear his head: the truth is that walking together can induce a very particular silence. There is an important safety in the sound of the other’s footfalls, a reassurance in the light touch of the other’s shoulder. The profile of the other comes into and out of the light, and each time subtly different, infinities being re-corded at a speed outside of time. One can speak, or not speak, particularly if there is peace between you.

  Perhaps, if they had not spoken in the café, they would have leapt into a cab, and hurried to some other public place; would have been compelled to run, that is, instead of being able to walk. Arthur puts up his coat collar, Guy knots his scarf. Each has his hands in his pockets. Guy’s bowlegged roll causes his shoulder to touch Arthur’s from time to time; from time to time, Guy elaborates this roll a little, deliberately, and he and Arthur glance at each other, smiling.

  They do not speak until they reach the large fountain, at an intersection. There is a cab stand in the center of the avenue.

  “Mon cher chanteur,” says Guy, “we must eat.”

  They stop, facing each other, under the streetlight.

  “Right. Where?”

  Guy makes a face, looks around the avenue. “I do not like to eat around here. This is not”—he laughs—“my territory.”

  He looks at Arthur, and laughs, and Arthur laughs.

  “Shall we, then, cross the river? We can find a place near home, d’accord? And, then, perhaps, we shall find some music in le quartier latin? That is where you were living,” he explains. “I see that you do not remember your old neighborhood at all. Ah! Les touristes!”

  “Listen, baby. Just get me to some grits, okay? I don’t know why all you Frenchmen pick out the coldest-ass street corners to start running down your shit.”

  “Ah! comme tu es mal poli! Ils sont tous comme ça, chez toi? Donc, je commence à comprendre enfin ce sacré probléme noir!’ He takes Arthur by the arm, laughing, and they cross to the cab stand. “Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Guy tells the driver, and they get into the cab.

  Guy presses his hand for a moment, and looks at him. “Ça va?”

  “I won’t lie about it, man,” says Arthur. “Ça va très bien—my French is improving, right?”

  “You are making great progress. If only—” The cab begins speeding toward the Place de la Concorde. The lights spin by, making Arthur remember the lights of a children’s carnival, in his childhood, or in his dreams, he does not know. Guy sighs, then grins, and turns to Arthur. “We must not speak of your amazing linguistic gifts before supper, tomorrow night. But it would be a pity to let them go to waste.”

  “I imagine,” says Arthur, “that we’re going to have a pretty late supper.”

  “It is possible,” says Guy, “especially since I am the cook.”

  Arthur watches the immense column of the Place de la Concorde come closer, as icy as some relic watched over only by the moon. Perhaps it does not belong here; just as it is strange to name a place where the guillotine once stood. Concorde.

  But history may be the most mystical of all our endeavors, and Arthur turns his mind away from the monument exactly as the cab turns, and begins to cross the river.

  They eat in some crowded, cheerful, friendly place, somewhere in the shadows of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince. They are at a corner table, in what must have been a Chinese, or, in any case, Oriental restaurant, because waiters keep coming with dishes. They seem to eat for hours, and, since they are happy, everyone around them seems to be celebrating something. They drink a lot of wine: waiters keep coming with bottles. They talk—or Arthur talks: into Guy’s square, flushed, and laughing face, Guy’s hand always seeming to be poised above yet another covered dish. Arthur shovels it all in, and so does Guy, it is as though they are connected by invisible threads, choreographed from the depthless center, as though the calendar has been corrected by eternity, and eternity is smiling.

  Yes. My brother was happy. I wish I had b
een there. I am glad that I could not have been there. He could not have seen, if I had been there (though I could have seen it—of course) that he was happy because he made Guy happy. He has never known himself to make anyone happy before.

  He does not really know this, now: yet, here it is, before him, Guy’s radiant face, Guy, with those deep-set brown eyes, that just-beginning-to-be-weathered brow, that rough, red, curly hair. Above all, the delight in those eyes when they look at Arthur.

  It must have been a Chinese—or an Oriental—restaurant, for they drink tea, finally, after all the exotic dishes have been cleared away. The restaurant, abruptly, is less crowded, but it is not late. Arthur looks at his watch, and it is just a little past midnight.

  Guy is watching him.

  He picks up Arthur’s pack of cigarettes, lights one, and hands it to Arthur. Arthur takes it, and they watch each other.

  There is a look in Guy’s eyes which Arthur is beginning to know. There is an anguish in those eyes, at the bottom of those eyes, like something living, and determined to live, in the depths of a dungeon, having been hurled there: which knows, and wants you to know that it knows, what happened: something which refuses reconciliation. This is also the look at the very bottom of Arthur’s eyes, though Arthur does not know this, and, of course, has never seen it: in his own eyes, that is.

  Guy sees in Arthur what Arthur would not dream of looking for in Guy. The stubborn anguish Guy sees in Arthur corroborates Guy’s reality, may be said, even, to give him the right to live; it begins to divest him of his irksome privilege, his blinding color, and welcomes him, so to speak, into the human race. Thus, he can, he hopes, he imagines, meet Arthur on Arthur’s ground. But there is absolutely no point in attempting to meet Arthur on Arthur’s ground, and anyway, Guy cannot do this, not yet, and Arthur knows it. It is not because he cannot know Arthur’s ground, but because he does not know his own. Guy and Arthur may be equally lonely, but Guy is far more isolated. Arthur is far more a stranger for Guy than Guy can be for Arthur; at least, in principle, and as a result of history. Arthur does not need Guy’s suffering to corroborate his own reality, or Guy’s. Those realities, simply, are not in question, and, as for being welcomed into the human race, that was long ago accomplished, by iron and fire.

  Guy has said that his history is clinging to him, but what he means is that he has no acceptable access to that history: it cannot feed him, it can only diminish him. In any case, it must all be reexamined and overhauled before it can possibly be used, and this examination will take the rest of Guy’s life. Guy, like many another, like Arthur, like you and me, in fact, would rather spend his life without wrestling with history.

  For this is also Arthur’s torment, although the terms are so unutterably different.

  To overhaul a history, or to attempt to redeem it—which effort may or may not justify it—is not at all the same thing as the descent one must make in order to excavate a history. To be forced to excavate a history is, also, to repudiate the concept of history, and the vocabulary in which history is written; for the written history is, and must be, merely the vocabulary of power, and power is history’s most seductively attired false witness.

  And yet, the attempt, more, the necessity, to excavate a history, to find out the truth about oneself! is motivated by the need to have the power to force others to recognize your presence, your right to be here. The disputed passage will remain disputed so long as you do not have the authority of the right-of-way—so long, that is, as your passage can be disputed: the document promising safe passage can always be revoked. Power clears the passage, swiftly: but the paradox, here, is that power, rooted in history, is also, the mockery and the repudiation of history. The power to define the other seals one’s definition of oneself—who, then, in such a fearful mathematic, to use Guy’s term, is trapped?

  Perhaps, then, after all, we have no idea of what history is: or are in flight from the demon we have summoned. Perhaps history is not to be found in our mirrors, but in our repudiations: perhaps, the other is ourselves. History may be a great deal more than the quicksand which swallows others, and which has not yet swallowed us: history may be attempting to vomit us up, and spew us out: history may be tired. Death, itself, which swallows everyone, is beginning to be weary—of history, in fact: for death has no history.

  Our history is each other. That is our only guide. One thing is absolutely certain: one can repudiate, or despise, no one’s history without repudiating and despising one’s own. Perhaps that is what the gospel singer is singing.

  For presently, Guy and Arthur leave the restaurant, which is, somewhere, forever, in the shadows of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and they walk, in the chilly winds, and along various byways, and along the quai St.-Michel, looking down at the river and across to the other shore, and enter, finally, the rue de la Huchette: which translates, Arthur told me, as “the street of the fishing cat.” (He seemed to feel that the street had been named for him.)

  It is Guy’s idea, for he knows, as Arthur does not, that there are several jazz joints—“Dee-xie-land,” according to Guy—along this street. They enter one of them, purely at random, pulled in by the music. There is an American trio playing, and an old blues singer from Memphis, Sonny Carr, is sitting in.

  The place is not very large, is very crowded, and the trio—two young blacks, and one young white, piano, bass, and slide trombone—are playing. All of the tables are occupied. Guy takes their coats to the vestiare, and they stand at the bar, which is also very crowded.

  It is a fairly young crowd, and somewhat more varied than would be likely to be found in any other quarter of Paris: young French students, and students not so young, children from the Netherlands, from Germany, from England, Americans, black and white, black Africans, and children from North Africa.

  The last two groups are the people who intrigue and intimidate Arthur most. He feels a great need to reach them, but does not know how; does not know, for that matter, if they want to be reached, and, in any case, he does not speak French. He does not know if he likes them or not, and this is because he is so terrified of not liking them. In this, he does not see how American, how Western, how white he is being, which is to say, and in the most subtle sense of the word, how racist: for why should he like them, after all, to say nothing of how? Nobody likes great crowds of people, unless he intends to use them, and some of the people who make up such a marked mob are perfectly aware of this. Earlier, Arthur had hoped not to be forced to examine Guy’s credentials, but now, he is somewhat worried about his own. If he doesn’t know what he thinks of them, he certainly doesn’t know what they think of him, and he is not a crowd.

  But the ancient blues singer, a weary and triumphant mountain of a man, is sitting quietly—or, more precisely, quietly towering—at the end of the bar, and he and two or three of the young Africans seem to be having a fine time together.

  The old blues singer is as black as the black Africans, or very nearly, and much darker, of course, than the North Africans. Though this observation is somewhat too swift; it is necessary to revise the optic through which one sees what has come to be called color. The children from the Netherlands, from Germany, from England, for example, are all, more or less, the same color, and this would not even have been a question, had Arthur found them in New York, or in Boston. In the harsh, democratic light of these metropolises, they would have been the same color, whether they liked it or not. But, truthfully, if one really looks at them, though they are, anonymously, the same color, they are not, intimately, the same shade. Different histories, and different hazards, are written just beneath the skin, these histories and hazards accounting for the subtleties of shade. Some descend from the Viking by way of Constantinople, some from the Turk by way of Vienna, some from the Jew by way of Turkey, some from Turkey by way of the Spanish Jew, some from the Portuguese by way of New England: and all from a history, if that is the word we want, which predates what is known as Europe. And these subtleties are in their eyes�
��if one wished, ruthlessly, to pursue the matter, in their names. They are, therefore, not only what their history has made of them, they are also what they make of their history. And what brings them here? So far from the Druid forest? To listen to a trio, piano, bass, and slide trombone, from, after all, let’s face it, the Lord alone knows where. One will not find the answer in the colors of their skins.

  And this is also true of the venerable blues singer, and the Africans who surround him. In New York or in Boston, they would, of course, all be the same color, being seen, necessarily, through the optic of power and guilt—being seen, necessarily indeed, as objects. But here, in this beleaguered capital, and not as far from home as Arthur is, no matter which way he turns, which body of water he faces, or which overland journey, their shades are more vivid than their color. Their shades are mute testimony to a journey which the Netherlands, for example, deny. It is impossible to know what future can be made out of an alabaster past so resounding, and an ebony past so maligned, but some key may be found in the palette which experiments with colors in order to discover shades, which mixes shades in order to arrive at a color, or color, which, by the time one has arrived at it, and by means of this process, always bears an arbitrary and provisional name. Shades cannot be fixed; color is, eternally, at the mercy of the light.

  Sonny Carr’s hair is pepper-and-salt, and still very thick; his teeth are still bad news for a pork chop. Arthur has heard of him all of his life, and scarcely dares imagine how old he must be.

  Paul has spoken of him, had known him in the South, many years ago, and briefly: but Sonny Carr had been a man when his father had still been a boy. And he has not really worked in the United States for very nearly as long as Arthur has been on earth.

  Here he is, now. Arthur dare not imagine what drove him here, what his connections are, or have been. He appears to be treated with a mocking, respectful affection. Arthur sees this in the faces of the young men, and in the old man’s face: though he does not really think of him as an old man, there is something in the face too present, too joyous, and too generous. But they are not really talking, for the trio is playing. Sonny Carr growls encouragement to the trio from time to time, and the trio responds with the faintest suggestion of a mocking flourish—but always responds—and this is almost precisely the rapport between the blues singer and the Africans: easy, tense, and precise.