28

Five years ago, shortly before I saw a white rose eaten from its stem and before I was smart enough to view this sight as symbolic of the fact that my romance with Dawn had no future (I am speaking of a past that seems more remote, more past, more legendary to me than any other, even more alien than the present), I had pretty much finished dreaming my dream of myself as the author of the literary masterpiece of the era and future Nobel laureate. This was the time of my increasingly hectic dashes from Hamburg to Paris (via Holland, where my son attended boarding school, and where I would hurriedly insert a visit that was probably disappointing to him). I dashed back and forth until I finally stopped going back to Hamburg. Except one last time, in early 1965, for Schwab’s funeral. And, oddly enough, I retain the memory of those days as a happy period, despite all the ordeals that Dawn inflicted on me. I served my piglets fairly and honestly, was, with my nationless language skills, even more useful to them here in Paris than in their country, but of course was not fairly and honestly rewarded for my services, though I lived well on their expense accounts. Paris, the bright and beautiful underworld, into which I had descended like Orpheus to bring Dawn/Eurydice back to the light of day, turned out to be a rather comfortable place to live. I enjoyed the renown of a man having a romance with a setting star, Nadine Carrier, to whom I ran back after sporadic abstinence like a dipsomaniac to his bottle. My name haunted the gossip sheets (“Will Nadine be unlucky in love with her screenscripter?”). Whenever I visited my son at his Dutch school, his classmates asked me for autographs, and here in Paris the newsdealer in the stand outside the Deux Magots treated me like a familiar and intimate friend. My cases, crates, and cartons were crammed with the starts, the commenced and uncompleted chapters, the drafts, notes, and all the possible sketches for my book that I had carried through life for fourteen years, and now I was about to dump them into the nearest dustbin and finally be liberated from my obsession. It was only with Schwab that I kept up the fiction that I was still writing, and I construed his farewell gesture, when I last saw him, in October 1964, as a desperate request to keep going, undaunted. After being fired by Scherping, Schwab could no longer get me advances for my book, but he urgently wanted me to finish writing it. He stuffed into my pockets the money that was bursting out of his, in order to obligate me to write, the bastard . . .

A little later I didn’t need him, for Gaia had entered my life, the chocolate-brown Princess Jahovary, God bless her in her vanilla-scented weightiness. It was she who from then on identified with my masterpiece, and since my need for love had not been fulfilled by all the previous one great only and exclusive loves, I loved her ardently and did whatever she wanted. Thus did my suffering begin anew.