The Last Days of New Paris

He indicated me to sit in the room’s only chair, moving his bag from it. I hesitated to do so because of his age but he motioned again, impatiently, so I obeyed, and for most of the hours that followed he remained standing, sometimes pacing, sometimes shifting his weight a little from leg to leg, never losing his restlessness or energy. When he did sit, it was on the very edge of the made-up bed, and rarely for long.

He told me he understood I was a writer, and that I was interested in Surrealism and in radical politics, and that on that basis he had a story to tell me. I allowed that I was, but cautioned that I was by no means a specialist in the history of the movement. I told him that there were many people more expert than I, and that perhaps he and my acquaintance should seek out one of them.

The man gave one of what was to be his rare wintery smiles.

“Elle a déjà essayé,” he said. She had tried already. I was, he said, the fourth person she had contacted, in an increasing hurry as, according to that unclear schedule, time grew short. He let that sit a moment. So I was the best that she could come up with, and now it was my job to listen, to take notes, and ultimately to do with what he told me whatever I thought best.

He waited while I organized myself, got my pen and paper ready. I brought out my phone to record but he shook his head so I put it away again. He seemed to chop the air in front of me with his hands, organizing his thoughts.

“Your Paris,” he began, “is old Paris. In New Paris, things were different. There was a man in New Paris. He was looking down. It was night. Beyond a wall of ripped-up city, Nazis were shooting.”

Thus began thirty-nine extraordinary, indeed — the adjective isn’t hyperbolic — life-changing hours. Over their course, uninterrupted by sleep, growing more and more bleary and vague, fortified by crisps and chocolate and water and a nasty wine from the mini-bar, the man told me the last days of New Paris, the story that I have presented here.

He spoke in passé simple and imparfait: he was never other than ambiguous about whether what he was telling me was a story, though his explanations of the city’s quiddity, of its history, his descriptions of the streets and landscapes of New Paris, were completely vivid. At times he would hesitate and take my notebook from me and scribble an illustration of what he was describing. I still have them. He was no artist, but sometimes it helped me visualize. And very often it would provoke a memory in me, of some other image or poem or passage, and I would take it from him and draw myself, asking him, “Is this right? Did it look like this?” Sometimes much later I would go back to my own books, looking for a source I thought I could recall. Here I’ve reproduced those of my sketches that he implied were most accurate.

On three occasions during our time together, he brought out some notebooks of his own. Battered, ancient, blood- and dirt- and ink-stained things. He would not let me read them in their entirety, but he would show me certain sections, certain dated entries in scrawled French, and let me copy out phrases or even other sketches of what he documented (those last he clearly had not drawn himself).

The man was an utterly compelling storyteller, but a disorganized one. I was captivated and adrift. He spoke with concentration and without hesitation, but — clearly feeling under immense pressure of time — he went too fast, and my notes, made in translation, would falter. He told events out of order. He doubled back on himself to fill in details he realized he had missed. Sometimes he would contradict himself, or veer between historical speculation and seeming certainty. He could be sidetracked and go off on a rumination or explanation of some detail of New Paris that, while rarely anything other than fascinating, was only tangentially related to the story he was telling.

About New Paris itself, he never spoke with anything other than the most wrenching, oneiric specificity. In his descriptions of the time before the S-Blast, of Marseille, of the Villa Air-Bel, he used a different register. Then he was recounting something told to him, something reconstructed, the result of investigations — investigations unfinished and full of holes, that I, dutifully, with much research, would later do my best to fill.