Thus nothing newly whole, nothing newly full of life has become of me in the new (American) era. And of course I most certainly have not remained what I was. So kindly understand what I find so fascinating about the French. Not only have they remained what they were, they have even become more intensely what they had been. Schwab was filled with excited sympathy for this phenomenon.

Cast to and fro by the capricious fate that attends a filmmaker (I’m a screenwriter, as you know), I hang around the various mini-metropolises of Europe: Vienna, Madrid, Rome, Munich, Copenhagen, Milan, West Berlin. A Europe that is woefully shriveled, likewise mutilated by one half, ridiculously provincial, suburban, desolate. But for several years now (ever since a crazy romance with an American fashion model named Dawn, at least since Schwab’s death), it’s been safest to contact me here in Paris. No household of my own, of course. After my dismal experiences in an abortive marriage in Hamburg (with Christa), I tried to settle down here (with Gaia—chocolate-brown giantess, half-Afro-American, half-Romanian blood, Princess Jahovary—sounds like a freak show and looked like one, too). My attempt at domesticity failed, but you’ll hear about that later.

Now, what so utterly frustrated me here is the unbelievable, downright incredible hard surface of the French. Cartesians clear as crystal, these fellows, and coalesced into a geode. It makes for a world that’s not so easy to get into. At any rate, I haven’t managed, even though I sense—good Lord! even though I know that it’s my world. Yes sir, it is my world in almost every way, and I (or at least the I of the lost half of my life) am contained in it integrally (as you’d say in electricians’ parlance, that of my Uncle Helmuth’s former clan).

Here, nearly everything of the lost half of my life has been preserved: forms, colors, tones, fragrances galore, an entire language-world (which did a great deal to determine the style of that era), no end of art nouveau and art deco. And yet here I lose not only my sense of having once belonged to a world like this but any solid foothold in time, above all in the present.

The world is an event in which I do not participate, have never participated, and will never participate. The world is a French event, and I am not French. I am not even a boche, like Schwab—a potential killer of Frenchmen (I repeat: an intimate kinship, almost a kind of identification). Nor am I American, which would be a different form of killer of the French mode of being. I am nothing. Not only stateless in terms of citizenship but rootless by blood, déraciné par excellence: truly without a fatherland or a father, a man who doesn’t know who spawned him, and whose mother deserted and betrayed her kin, her people; a man who belongs neither here nor there, unbaptized, with no religion, suspiciously polyglot, devoid of any tie to any tribe, to any flag . . . But of course in search of all those things.