By R. Zamora Linmark
Monday, June 13, 2011
2:05 a.m. Jet-lag-inspired tosses and turns. Entire building is moaning to Adele, Rihanna, Lady Gaga.
Nth attempt to get past Jacques Jouet’s: “At this point, the story will follow some paths that may appear whimsical on the surface.”
“It’s not summer in Paris if it’s not in heat,” Victor, half a day later, on the 9th arrondissement, near the boulevard of sex toys.
Honolulu, where I originated, is half a day behind Paris. Eternity, with a pinched nerve.
3:15 a.m. Exact time in The Amityville Horror when Ronald DeFeo, Jr., murdered his parents and siblings. I open my notebook and write nothing special. Just jotting down the word journée and circling it over and over.
Jour/née. Day/Birth.
In The Narrow Road to the Interior, the itinerant poet Bashō begins his northbound pilgrimage: “Each day is a journey; each journey, another home.”
In my version: “Each day is a journey; each journey, another medical crisis.” One time — I was on an artist residency in upstate New York — it was a nasty lower back pain. Turned out I had shattered the nerves surrounding my coccyx. So much for going with dearest Frank’s “you just go on your nerve” advice. Left a big question mark on the chiropractor’s progress note sheet. Everything ruled out. Wrestling and mock air crash drill included. Then, the endless running jokes, e.g. shredded nerves due to non-oiled orgasm. The pain went away after two heating pad sessions.
Fast forward five years later, Paris. This time — a frozen left shoulder. Symptoms include pain x 10, screaming for Gethsemane while putting on a shirt, training myself to sleep with half of my upper body in an imaginary cast for the next six months.
Insomnia Ideation: Yasunari Kawabata suffered from nightmares about Mishima for three hundred nights in a row.
Two blocks away — my brother William and his partner Greg comfortably snoring beside Jardin du Luxembourg.
4:57 a.m. After two tabs of Motrin: “A closer look will reveal that the narrative is, in fact, rigorously following logical paths that it is unaware of, or that the current page is hiding” – Jouet, accurately summing up my current mental status.
First full day in Paris. City of twenty circles. The larger the integer, the farther one is from Mona Lisa.
12:45 p.m. “This year our hotel proposes you prices quite soft… This exceptional offer is to be seized as far as our available funds.” — posted sign at the front desk.
Pont de l’Archeveche, walking distance from Notre Dame cathedral, a wire fence of padlocks marked with names of lovers. Coupled or in groups, they pass around bottles of wine, break baguettes, strum guitars, store the afternoon kiss in front of cell phone cameras before the tossing of keys into the Seine.
“Being free means choosing to be whose slave I want to be” — Catherine Deneuve.
2:30 p.m. Take number 4 line to Montparnasse Bienvenue, then transfer to the 12 line northbound to St. Georges, where Victor lives. It’s hard to memorize metro lines by the color because there are a thousand lines and the Parisian palette only has primary and secondary colors and their various shades. A blue line is not blue enough because there’s a blue between sky and baby, and another one closer to midnight. Worse for aqua or turquoise, or a green that’s dark but not dark enough to be in the forest because it’s more like the type of green that doesn’t want to be a lima bean.
Victor lives in a pied-à-terre. Fancy word to describe the wooden gate hiding a courtyard with several doors where I have to guess which door leads to Victor’s staircase that’ll make my lungs collapse five flights of steps later.
Coffee con cigarettes and cake from The Ritz.
“Cake’s so beautiful, Victor, I don’t want to stab it.”
Afternoon with Victor is what a blind date should aspire to be. Nonstop dialogue that doesn’t have time for bubble thoughts. Except this isn’t a blind date, but two guys who were introduced to each other at a New Year’s party in Manila, then re-introduced to each other at another party a week later, hosted by the same guy.
Aside from designing clothes, Victor is also a chef who speaks Thai because he’s lived in New York City and has a flat in Tokyo and another in Waikiki. This is what becomes of your bio when your family owns one of the major shipping lines in the motherland.
In fear of pregnant pauses, Victor turns the talk to — what else? – OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers). A topic certain to extend the conversation to other parts of the world, since ten percent of the Philippine population are now diaspora-certified, and by ten percent, I’m only counting those who are working abroad and not those who have already transitioned from adapted to adopted status, Third World to third-class global citizens.
“We’re as scattered as South Asians” — me.
“Except we disappear” — Victor.
Multi-tasking Filipinos can morph themselves into another Other. This ability to masquerade behind other people’s masks is called “multi-masking.”
5:15 p.m. Late for afternoon wine and cheese with William, Greg, and Allan at the Luxembourg Gardens, I touch-type on Victor’s laptop while chatting with Victor, I give birth to a new language: ;o?key go??q be lqte.
“WTF-kind of keyboard is this?” — me.
“French” — Victor.
“Might as well be Chinese or Aramaic” — me.
En route to the metro station, Victor and I pass Hôtel Langlois. Most infamous resident: Oscar Wilde. But the assistant manager does not remember the exact room Wilde and his boy toy Bosie billeted during their turbulent three-year relationship.
6:05 p.m. Uncorking a bottle of Beaujolais at the Medici Fountain in Jardin du Luxembourg. Bread with pâté next to Polyphemus surprising Acis and Galatea. Even with a frozen shoulder, Paris is unbearably beautiful.
“Did you know Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables in the nude?” — William.
“And The Hunchback of Notre Dame” — Greg.
“He ordered his butler to take all his clothes and ordered him to disappear until nightfall” — William.
“Hemingway too” — Greg.
“D.H. Lawrence climbed mulberry trees naked then climbed down with Lady Chatterley” — me.
Montez, descendez, librement.
Pen, paper, pinched nerve.
Tuesday, June 14
12:14 a.m. Catching up with Roberto Bolaño’s necrophiliac from his posthumous short-story collection The Return. Jean-Claude Villeneuve: world-renowned fashion designer: a hybrid of Karl Lagerfield (“long white hair and thick glasses”) and Mick Jagger (“old rock star suffering from insomnia”).
Jean-Claude drinks apple juice and puts on music before he seduces the corpse he’s rented from a pair of undertakers. The victim is our thirty-four-year-old divorcée-turned-posthumous narrator whose cardiac arrest on the dance floor was beyond revivable. Just like Patrick Swayze’s character in Ghost, except Bolaño’s ghost is the object of a Parisian pervert — a sick-and-sad eccentric who craves cuddling and kissing and compressing the Kama Sutra into a half-hour thigh-fucking session.
Even in the afterlife, the dead are cursed to witness man’s pathetic pining to connect with other loners.
1:45 p.m. Grand Palais. Anish Kapoor’s site-specific installation where art, time, memory, and identity are dismantled. No way of telling night from day. Every hour, every minute, every second, every breath held and exhaled is monitored in red. Even echoes of our voices, of our own breathing become immaterial.
We are mere nomads in its three-chambered womb.
Panic looming, I pull my invisible brown paper bag out and blow air into it.
Speedily, skylight reveals a web-like design hovering us. An aftermath scaffold. Or a reminder that darkness does make room for little miracles, that it does bring us closer to understanding why we keep turning towards the direction of light, why we pay and wait in line to enter the belly of a beast, why we fade in and out in red.
After exiting through a different door, sunlight slams into our eyes. Light-lashed, we stand wide-eyed under the monstrous inflated sculpture that takes up much of the Grand Palais.
4:05 p.m. Landscape with two drag queens chain smoking.
6:50 p.m. To Ligaya’s house: take number 4 Porte de Clignancourt-bound line then transfer at Reamur Sebastopol for the 3 Gallieni-bound line to Republique.
Ligaya is from Davao. How do I know Ligaya? I don’t. I was invited to her dinner party by Bonnie. How do I know Bonnie? Through Yahoo, by our mutual friend Marianne, who’s based in the Bay Area.
After handing Ligaya a bottle of wine and a chain of sorrys for being unfashionably late, I introduce myself to “Tata” (goodbye in England but an old man in Northern Philippines); Iya, who just finalized her divorce; Evelyn, who’s married to a linguist with an interest in Hawaiian Creole English; Jeremy, the programmer for Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight, which Auraeus, a filmmaker, keeps addressing “Kenzen.”
10:30 p.m. Back in bed with Motrin, Pound, and Pasolini.
Pasolini: When you write, is your situation similar to that of the surrealists? That is, do you let the inspiration, the word, the language, come out almost automatically, or do you write very slowly, weighing one word at a time?
Pound: I missed out on that.
Tempted to abandon unfinished hours and, like Valéry, reclaim them only after twenty years.
But I fear I will miss out on more variations of emptiness.
Wednesday, June 15
10:30 a.m. A passing thought while passing La Closerie des Lilas along boulevard Montparnasse: How could Hemingway write The Sun Also Rises amidst all that salmon tartare, steak, and Beckett going on and on (or off) on Godot?
Red-canopied Café de la Rotonde. Allan takes a series of snapshots of me with portraits of interwar intellectuals, i.e. starving artists who lived on ten-centime café and broken baguettes. Except for one, all came out out-of-focus.
Peppercorn steak highly recommended by the waiter.
“Beer and bread, merci beaucoup.”
12:30 p.m. Montparnasse Cemetery. Two hours before my train departs for London, a scavenger’s hunt inside the city’s second largest necropolis.
Beneath a canopy of ash and lime, conifer and maple trees, thujas and sophoras, I race against time to pay homage to some of my heroes.
“We kill time; time buries us” — Machado de Assis.
From the main entrance on boulevard Quinet, Simone de Beauvoir sharing eternity with Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg.
On the opposite side: Duras. Next twenty minutes a waste, going crazy hunting down Baudelaire.
“Excusez moi, où est-ce que le tombeau de Baudelaire?” — me to the groundskeeper.
1:05 p.m. Baudelaire’s name sandwiched by family members.
Running in circles inside section three looking for Cortázar, I stumble on the marbled plaque of Philippe Noiret. Alfredo, the Italian projectionist in Cinema Paradiso, and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in Il Postino.
Even in death, Cortázar is hiding.
“Allan, look for Man Ray in section seven.”
Found him, thanks to a British guy, screaming, “Cortázar! Cortázar.”
Minutes later, Allan: “Man Ray’s missing, but I found Ionesco.”
“Great. Now — Beckett. Section twelve.”
“You’ll miss your train.”
“I can’t leave Paris without touching Beckett.”
Looking for Beckett’s tomb is like waiting for Godot to resurrect at ten past two.
Tomb after tomb — no sign of Beckett. Instead, César Vallejo.
I run to the graves with the most flowers, metro tickets, spiral notebooks, love letters, lipstick-imprinted kisses. Nada.
Raindrops. I dash back to the map. “He’s on the edge,” I shout to Allan, “he’s on the edge.”
1:40 p.m. Around the corner from Susan Sontag — there was Beckett, decorated by three subway tickets.
3:15 p.m. Aboard a Eurostar train crossing the English Channel:
Pasolini: All critics are in agreement that your poetry is enormously vast. It’s as if your poems covered the surface of an immense poetic territory. And this is true, one quotation after another…
Pound: They’re made at random.
Pasolini: What are at random? The criticisms or the quotations?
Pound: They’re made at random, they say, but it isn’t true. They’re musical, musical themes that recur.
5:30 p.m. At the London station I suddenly remember Vallejo’s “I will die in Paris with a rainstorm / on a day I already remember” and I sit and wait for my shadow to catch up.
R. Zamora Linmark is the author of two novels, Rolling The R’s and Leche, and three poetry collections — Prime-Time Apparitions, The Evolution of a Sigh, and Drive-By Vigils, all from Hanging Loose Press. His forthcoming collection, Pop Verite, is also from HLP. He divides his writing life between Manila, Honolulu, and Miami, where he is currently the Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
