The Naked Eye Read online

  Sometimes the language of the film struck me as too primitive: a young man with neatly trimmed hair and glasses, for example, is an intellectual, uncompromising, and later will become a Communist and leave the house of his birth. Or his mother who wears an expensive silk blouse and never puts down her abacus is a good businesswoman and conservative. Or a worker, her husband, and her small children who flee the place where they have been exploited unendurably are good-natured. On the road they meet Camille, but sooner or later they are captured and bound to stakes near the shore so that the ocean will slowly drown them as the tide rises. When the water retreats, their pale corpse faces appear. Camille’s shock is more than understandable. Only the face of Eliane never loses its ambiguity. It withdraws more and more from the violence of the images, providing a quiet refuge outside the film’s plot to give my longing someplace to go.

  Communist, anarchist, terrorist. I love these words because I can recognize them even in French. Camille is arrested as a Communist. Her life in the labor camp is not shown. One day the door of the camp is opened. I don’t know how much time has elapsed since her arrest. Eliane hurries through the crowds of people—she’s come to get Camille. Every person in the crowd is trying to find his liberated relatives or friends. In the throng, Eliane loses her elegant hat, then finally sees Camille, rushes up to embrace her and asks question after question, speaking to her so lovingly it’s almost painful to hear. This is more affection than she’s ever shown for any man, but Camille’s gaze is hovering in midair, strangely unmoved. After a while she says the words that cause Eliane to burst into tears. Camille weeps, too. I’m glad I don’t understand these words.

  I was afraid to learn Camille’s reply. At the same time, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I convinced Ai Van to come to the movies with me and translate this line. “Go back to France! Indochina no longer exists! It is dead!” my interpreter, Ai Van, whispered in my ear. Within me it is Eliane who is weeping, not Camille. The lights turned on in the movie theater and my cheeks were still wet. Ai Van dragged me to a little ice-cream parlor and asked: “Why are you crying? Wouldn’t you rather eat an ice cream? Did you see Camille’s eyes when she was released? They were so inhuman. I can’t understand these Communists. But the film wasn’t bad.”

  I was still going to the clinic three times a week. They no longer took blood from me; instead they smeared ointments on my skin and then peeled my skin off bit by bit.

  One Friday I was informed that Dr. Lee was ill. In her place, a man in a light-blue lab coat entered. He divided my back into forty-nine little squares and tested various salves. I looked at my back in the mirror, twisting my neck unnaturally to look behind me. “Some products really do have to be tested on a delicate, civilized back. You can’t just try everything on rats—they are far too quick to adapt, like the foolish masses,” the man said in jest. My mouth reacted quickly and thoughtlessly like the muscular reflexes of a frog right after it’s been killed: “And you fled the country in 1975 because you didn’t want to have anything to do with the foolish masses?” The man’s fingers froze. After a moment of silence, he asked in return: “And you? An illegal alien?” “What do you mean by illegal? Or are the experiments you’re doing here legal by any chance?” “Why would you come to us if you have such suspicions? Why don’t you find some other job that suits you better? Not long ago someone saw you on the street at night. Why don’t you try streetwalking?” I put on my clothes and left the clinic.

  What was I supposed to do? I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly. What would Ai Van say? I went home. The air in the apartment felt strangely chalky. Jean was sitting slumped at the kitchen table. When he turned around, his face suddenly looked very old. “Where is Ai Van?” Instead of answering, he ran his fingers over a piece of plastic on the table. There were many other plastic parts lying there as well, in various shapes. A child would use them to build a small airplane or a military vessel. Jean’s pupils were fixed and red. I should have said something right away, but I couldn’t think of a single word. There was a faint, artificial smell of glue. Jean patted his trousers, extracted a few banknotes, and handed them to me like an old neighbor I once knew. This neighbor used to give children candy and in exchange asked incomprehensible things of them. I was astonished, for I had never before received money directly from Jean. He attempted a grandfatherly smile. In Ai Van’s presence, he generally was in the habit of keeping his face under control, impassive as a cowboy’s. Now his muscles had let go of the flesh. A ray of light falling through the kitchen window turned his hair silver.

  C h a p t e r S i x

  D r ô l e d ’ e n d r o i t p o u r u n e r e n c o n t r e

  My feet kept walking in a single direction. I stopped nowhere, not even in front of a movie theater that beckoned to me with its twinkling placards. Soon there were no more shop signs, only slumbering apartment buildings, followed by little parks, warehouses, gray walls, and vacant lots.

  It was already dark by the time I reached the parking lot. A single car was present, surrounded by the white lines separating the absent cars from one another. A public bathroom, a cigarette vending machine. Whenever a car drove past, I flinched. I would see the car’s two eyes without being able to make out the eyes of the driver. A policeman cruising by would stop to interrogate me. I was a suspicious woman in a parking lot—no car, no bags, no companion. It occurred to me that it might be better to keep out of sight, so I walked toward the women’s bathroom. Cold, moldy air rose from the sodden earth by the entrance. Midges hovered around a lantern like bits of fluff. They were remnants, left over from summer, or perhaps shrunken vampires, the afterimage of a film. Why was I here when I could be sitting in a movie theater? Was I planning to spend the night in this damp, cold bathroom? The money in my pocket was barely enough for a movie ticket, let alone a night in a hotel. I left the bathroom and immediately was attacked by a harsh light. I shielded my face with my elbows. There was a screech of brakes. The door of the car opened, and a rectangular businessman stepped out. “What are you doing here?” I couldn’t have explained my situation even in my native tongue. The man demanded an instant response. With both hands he gripped my shoulders, shaking them violently while yelling: “What are you doing here? What happened? Say something! Speak!” I put my right hand in my pants pocket as if I had an explanation stored inside. My fingers were surprised by a slip of paper. I held it to the dim light of the lantern. The man tore the paper out of my hand and read it aloud in his gravelly voice. Then he roughly put a hand on my back, which was still sore from the skin experiments, and pushed me into his car. I remembered the young man who’d given me the note at the movie theater. The word “meeting,” a date, a time, and the name of a cinema. With an exasperated expression, the man stepped on the gas and abruptly drove off. When we arrived at the theater, the young man came running up to me. When I turned back to look at the man in the car, he was already gone.

  The young man asked me something, probably who the man in the car was. He could have been asking something quite different. “I don’t know.” My answer had to be doubly correct, for I knew neither what had been asked nor who this man was. The two of us dove shoulder to shoulder into the warm darkness of the movie theater and sat there like twins in the womb. I stared in astonishment at the title that appeared on the screen. The sentence with the word “meeting” the young man had written on the slip of paper he’d given me was the title of the film. So he hadn’t in fact written that he wanted to see me again.

  The woman being played by you is having an argument with a man in a car. We don’t hear any voices, just the background noise of the highway. Where were we moviegoers sitting if we couldn’t hear you? And where were you? Through the car’s windshield the couple sees a white creature floating beside the road. It is a woman in fluttering pajamas. She throws herself in front of the car, and the squealing tires barely miss the body of the would-be suicide. The car drives on. The couple continue their argument. Soon the car slows and pulls
off into a deserted parking lot. The door opens and the woman is thrown out of the car, followed by her fur coat. The car traces an elegant curve and vanishes into the night. The woman gets up calmly. At first the parking lot looks deserted, but this isn’t true: a man stands beside a car with a raised hood. He approaches the woman, speaks to her in a bantering tone of voice, and then for some reason imitates a hen. The woman’s gaze keeps hovering at an altitude where neither a hen nor this man can be found. The man returns to his car; he carefully inspects the parts of the engine while poring over an instruction manual. The woman wraps herself in her fur coat, shivering. The fur, blond hair, skin, high heels: together these things possess an aura that appears on the screen as tiny golden feathers. The feathers are inconspicuously growing in the damp night air. The man wears only a shirt and a thin jacket but doesn’t seem to feel the cold. He retrieves some tennis socks and jogging shoes from the car and offers them to the woman. Her well-formed legs now have big clumps at the end. These humorous proportions call to mind an ostrich, but they render the beauty of the woman’s face all the more striking. Nonetheless, there is something missing for me in this face that I admired in Indochine.

  The next scene of the film: a highway rest stop. The car and its disassembled engine parts have been moved, at the insistence of the traffic cops, in front of the rest stop building. The man and woman are sitting together at a table. The dining room has a lightness made of plastic.

  The man can’t make up his mind. He leaves the table, walks over to the engine parts, returns. After a while, he leaves the table again. Later the woman leaves the rest stop, gets into the car and speaks to the man. She begins to kiss him absent-mindedly, as if possessed, as if she were trying to kiss all the microscopic angels floating in the air. Her nerves are charmingly frazzled, but her madness is not as anarchical as in Repulsion—there is something sentimental about it. Didn’t you go much farther in London when you were scarcely more than a girl? Have you forgotten your repulsion? In this film you are a woman who has been abandoned and is waiting for something to happen. You are a middle-class woman who is sensitive and sweet and coincidentally happens to find herself in crisis. This crisis is boring. Why don’t you bite the neck of the drowsy man to drink his fresh blood? In New York you’d have lost no time doing so. Now here you are sitting around groaning in a little French suburb. This man, lethargic as he appears, might one day, under different circumstances, be wide awake and courageous enough to take part in the resistance movement against the National Socialists. Then you as his beloved would surely play a quite different role, for example, the role of a stage actress whose Jewish husband, the owner of the theater, is hiding in the basement. You have only four years left before you’ll be confronted with the revolution in Indochina. Are you ready? What revolution are you waiting for at this highway rest stop?

  After the curtain closed, the young man brought me to an ice-cream parlor. I asked his name. “Charles,” he replied, and we both laughed, since the hero of the film was also called Charles. “And what is your name?” I gave myself the name “Thu Huong,” which I had never before used, and translated it for him as “perfume of autumn.”

  Autumn was beginning to scatter its leaves. Through the window I saw trampled leaves lying like shadows on the sidewalk. After Charles ordered two coffees for us, he started explaining something I was unable to comprehend. I would have given up quickly if he hadn’t kept repeating his sentences so tenaciously. It had to do with names. When you heard a name, the thing being named was suddenly far away. He was saying something like this, though I wasn’t sure whether these were his own thoughts on my name, or the words of Charles in the movie. Your name in this film was “France.” How extraordinary that a person and her country could share a name.

  Charles took a sip of coffee and said he had to make a quick phone call. As soon as he disappeared in the basement, I began to worry. What should I say if he wanted to escort me home afterward? What would I do if he didn’t try to escort me home and just left me alone on the street? If he invited me to his home, I would follow him at once and never leave him.

  Charles returned and gave me a nod. Someone would be coming, a friend of his who had something to do with Vietnam. The foamed milk on top of the coffee was unusually thick and firm. Soon a young, Vietnamese-looking man appeared and greeted Charles like an old friend. He looked a little like Camille’s fiancé in Indochine. Charles introduced him, saying, “This is my friend Tuong Linh.”

  Tuong Linh was a surgeon. He had emigrated to Paris with his family as a twelve-year-old, and later had studied medicine here. When Charles was brought to the hospital after a motorcycle accident, Tuong Linh was the doctor who had operated on his broken chin. Then they became friends. “Usually I avoid making friends with a patient. Charles was an exception, because he was a impossible patient. One day after the operation he escaped from the hospital and went to the movies. By coincidence, I was there, too. Before the film started, I noticed a head two rows in front of me that was braced with plaster and wrapped in a bandage. The head turned to the side, and I realized it had been lying beneath my knife only twenty hours before.” Charles was smirking. “But you didn’t come talk to me right away because you wanted to see the film. An egotistical doctor!” “What film was it?” “Un flic.” Tuong Linh looked at me and asked if I, too, was a passionate moviegoer. I immediately said “no,” regretted it at once and looked down because my cheeks were burning. They wouldn’t believe me if I said there wasn’t any other place I could survive except on the screen with you and that this was the only reason why I watched films. I couldn’t tell Tuong Linh about my cinema compulsion, my film fever. I always thought it was because I couldn’t speak that I couldn’t explain things. This excuse no longer counted since I could have explained everything to Tuong Linh in Vietnamese. I was as mute as I was in French. I could feel my heart pounding, and my throat was scratchy despite the soothing foamy milk. Tuong Linh didn’t push me, nor did he look disappointed. He spoke with Charles for a while about something else, then turned to me again and asked where I lived. “I don’t live anywhere any more. For various reasons I no longer have a home.” Tuong Linh took me home with him without posing any more questions.

  His apartment was unusually spacious for a single person. Pictures were hanging on the walls, among them a painting that showed a flat landscape with a large amount of sky. A Chinese ink painting depicted an emaciated hermit in the mountains. The bookshelf was completely filled with books that bore French titles on their mostly crêpe-yellow spines. It had been years since I’d read any literature. Back when I still went to school, I’d been addicted to books. Sometimes I even read when I was walking on the street and would trip over the baskets of the women selling vegetables. Suddenly I was seized by the burning desire to devour every single one of Tuong Linh’s books.

  Tuong Linh was a calm and quiet man. The next morning he gave me a set of keys and told me to rest.

  I liked the overpowering scent emanating from Tuong Linh’s fingers. It reminded me of the way a certain soap smelled. I no longer remembered where I had washed my hands with this soap.

  “I’m so happy I met you. Though I have once more missed my chance to learn French. I can go on living without speaking with anyone except you.” “Don’t you want to learn French?” “Yes, very much. But…”

  On the first evening, Tuong Linh gave me the only pillow he owned. Under his own head he placed his white sweater, neatly folded up.

  “You’ve gone out with Charles many times now, so you must speak French.” “The language of our dates is the movie schedule—a language that cannot be misunderstood. I can’t say anything else to him.” “Do you like him?” “Yes, very much.”

  When Tuong Linh had a day off, Charles would visit us and make us duck with white beans and other tasty dishes. His eyes and fingers flew ceaselessly back and forth between cutting board, knife, faucet, and the pot on the stove, while his mouth didn’t stop providing me new infor
mation about you. He liked to read film magazines and knew, for example, that you had two children of your own, what they were called, and who their fathers were. I wasn’t so interested in your private life as this private person was a stranger to me. What I wanted to know was what exactly Eliane had thought about Communism, and what Carol did for a living after she had regained consciousness. I also wanted to know when the next movie you were in was coming out. “You don’t have to keep us entertained at the same time as you’re cooking for us,” Tuong Linh said, but Charles ignored him and went on talking.

  Tuong Ling returned from work each day with his head numb, deadened, stuffed full. It wasn’t possible for him to catch a second wind in the evening and go out to the movies. So I would go alone, or else with Charles. Every time we went to a movie together, he would take me out for coffee afterward and would tirelessly ask me questions that I didn’t understand right away. He wouldn’t give up until I’d answered them. Sometimes he was completely satisfied with my reply even though I hadn’t understood his question and had just blurted something out. Perhaps not understanding or misunderstanding a question is something that often happens even to other people. No one notices, though, since the answers one gives generally happen to fit the questions anyhow.

  When he finished his coffee, Charles would always ask me what time it was, although he knew I didn’t have a watch on either. I understood this question right away when someone asked it in a movie. It was a strange feeling to understand a question right away. The question leapt into my brain cells so quickly I had no time to feel the question’s body. What time is it now? France asks this of the man who appears utterly uninterested in the time but nevertheless owns a watch. The man freezes there for two seconds as if he first must make sense of something unexpected.