This is the Ritual Page 13

  but when i had been crying 4 hours & lost everything i hear a voice. it is d angel she says SON YES IT IS DARK NOW U HAVE SEEN D TRUTH. D GREAT LONELINESS . . . THERE IS NO LOVE THERE IS NO HOPE . . . CRUELTY HAS WON U MUST ACCEPT THIS. D FATE OF D EARTH IS DECIDED. EARTH IS NOW HELL BUT IT IS STILL POSSIBLE FOR U TO LEAVE D EARTH. U MUST DESTROY D BODY & THEN I WILL TAKE U FAR AWAY IN SPACE. A SMALL BLUE PLANET WHERE D LORD JESUS LIVES IN EXILE. THIS IS ALL WE HAVE LEFT. I AM SORRY 4 EVERYTHING. IT IS NOT 2 LATE. U WILL COME TO ME TOMORROW NIGHT. WE WILL DESTROY D BODY & LEAVE D EARTH I WILL TAKE U FAR AWAY FROM HELL

  & then a peace came on me. still on d mountain i was surrounded by devils. but they were silent now. i stood up & walked among them i came down from d mountain i was not crying any more. i said to myself ‘give 2 satan what belongs 2 satan. d world can not be saved. my loved ones & many more will remain in hell. d earth is preparing now 2 become full actual hell this will happen in december 2012. d war 4 d earth has already been lost.’ i was resigned to this

  i tell u this because 4 my ma & da & Jennifer it is 2 late. they will be put into Pain Machine & howl 4 billions of years. but d angel told me it is possible 4 u 2 leave d earth in time. rob it is not enough 2 die. u must destroy d body & then b transported. 4 this u will need d angel. first u must accept jesus in yr heart. he is far away & he has failed us but he can help u 2 escape from d coming holocaust

  i can not help u any more. i am trying u must listen. time is short. v short. open yr heart. world is Satan but there is new home in deep space & i going there. u will hear no more from me rob. i will pray for u though. i am going 2 meet d angel

  Jean-Pierre Passolet, a Reminiscence

  When Jean-Pierre Passolet appeared at the door of his flat on a bright February morning in 2010, his loneliness was palpable. Still a thin, fragile-looking man, but with hair whiter than in the photographs, Passolet was living in a dismal council block far from the centre of London – the same flat in which he would be found, two years later, decomposing in his armchair. Driving out there that February day to interview him, taking in the dreary concrete anonymity into which London deteriorates when you cut through the East End, I had thought about some lines from Passolet’s lyric-essay, The Territories:

  These peripheral zones, out past the noise, out past the centre, are what death, what oblivion must look like. The high-rises, the rust and ruin, the choked canals and derelict playgrounds – all of it silent, all empty and barren, as though deserted. The people seem barely real. Only a ghost-life, a sketched life, is permitted here. Existence is a waiting room, an antechamber to nothingness. The people understand this, and so it is never spoken about. No one writes out here, and nor should they.

  Passolet, I knew, had moved out there because it was all he could afford. His sales had never been great, even during the peak of his acclaim, in the early nineties when Heaven and European Graveyards were published within a year of each other. By the time of my visit he’d long since given up the Hampstead house he’d lived in for several years with Lorraine Holden, his second wife, now divorced. I had gone there on the tube one Saturday afternoon to look at the old house, and to take some pictures. The contrast with his new dwelling was painful. There were even rumours that Passolet was on benefits.

  When I turned up to interview him, Passolet was a few months shy of his fifty-eighth birthday. The publishing world had all but left him behind. Attracting few readers now, he had put out his last two books with a very small independent publisher which would never bring him near even the modest fame that had once been his. I was not sure that he cared very much about this; to me, though, this fading of Passolet’s name, this premature obsolescence, was baffling and lamentable. Having first read him, in a trance of fascination, when I was eighteen, I considered Passolet a kind of unsung Sebald or Coetzee, a writer whose work was of a depth, intelligence and sustained, undemonstrative anguish that made him one of the most vital voices in contemporary letters. I hoped that the interview and the article I planned to write might do something to rehabilitate his reputation, and get people talking about him again (I was enjoying, at the time, a relative peak in my own visibility and influence).

  Opening the door to his flat on the third floor, Passolet regarded me briefly before offering his hand and saying, ‘Please come in.’ His voice was how I expected it to be – parched, weary, strained, though not unkind – or not, I mused, without ‘an obscene echo of kindness’ (the phrase came to me from European Graveyards). His accent was glaringly uncorroded, even in those three words. The interior of the flat had a twilight ambience that I sensed was as perpetual as the dust that hung in the air, coating my throat and making me cough as soon as we stepped inside. Passolet led me into a sitting room cluttered with books (most of the titles were in French), printed pages, journals and tax forms.

  I heard stirrings from the kitchen. A woman appeared in the doorframe, nodding politely at me before stepping into the hallway and closing the door behind her. ‘My partner,’ said Passolet. She was blonde, attractive, though her eyes were puffy and tired as if she’d been crying – intuitively I glimpsed the bitter fights they must have had, the insults and cruelty that probably made up their days. Perhaps, I thought, the miasma of loneliness pervading the flat was the kind that is heightened, not diminished, by the fact of two people’s proximity. Passolet offered me tea, which I declined. I cleared my throat, feeling a little nervous. He was sitting opposite me, across a low wooden table. ‘Shall we begin?’ I asked. He nodded his head, gaze turned downwards.

  I didn’t waste time on what I already knew: Passolet’s excruciating biography, the madness that had pursued him like some black awful wraith, ready to fall on him whenever he weakened. I knew about the psychiatric institutions he had staggered in and out of, an array of them pockmarking first France, then Belgium, and finally Britain. I knew about the ‘rituals with candles and deranged prayers’ he had performed during the nadir of his ordeal. And I knew what loomed behind it all: the sexual abuse he had suffered in his childhood, virtually every day for years, at the hands of his widowed mother’s boyfriend, in the town of Amiens where he grew up. That had gone on till he was thirteen. It was all there, in the books he had written. So too was the teenage alcoholism, and the ‘desperate appeal’ to Catholicism which ended when, at nineteen, he first read Schopenhauer. He would describe this last event in European Graveyards:

  I turned the pages in a kind of ecstasy or annihilation . . . The houses, the roads and buildings of that drab provincial town, and all the humans and institutions, and everything else fell away, as did the illusion that had sustained them, and I saw that I was falling, like everything else, falling through a limitless void, in slow-motion, without adhesion, the roar of an immense cosmic violence in my ears. But rather than terror, for the first time I felt blessed, liberated, relieved of the weight that had been crushing me all my life.

  After this powerful encounter, Passolet gave up drinking and moved to Paris, where he began studying theatre in the Conservatoire National. Initially imagining he would become an actor, he lost interest in the idea after a few years and dropped out, but not before having made many friends in the Parisian avant-garde of the mid-seventies. ‘People liked me because I wasn’t there,’ he later wrote. ‘At least, not as a threat or a rival, which is how most men are condemned to confront one another. I was agreeable because I never felt I had the right to judge or despise anyone.’ Despite his popularity, Passolet was still afflicted with depression and anxiety throughout these years, and was institutionalised several times. Somehow he managed to keep this fact, and the worst upheavals of his nervous condition, from his friends.

  A woman in her fifties named Silvia Bresson-Levaint, the childless wife of a respected theatre director, developed a particular fondness for Passolet. They became close friends, and the Bresson-Levaints would invite Passolet to spend periods at their summer house on the shore of Lake Annecy, at the foot of the French Alps. It is there that Madame Bresson-Levaint e
ncouraged the young Jean-Pierre to write. He had, in fact, been writing for several years, without any real direction or thought of publishing. ‘I wrote from the right-brain,’ he later recalled. ‘That is, from the dream-channel, the imagistic source into which one descends after falling asleep . . . What I wrote was shit, really, but it was the beginning, the scratchings at a surface I would spend decades excavating.’

  Silvia Bresson-Levaint was the kind of woman who might have run a literary salon in an earlier era; she had many friends who were writers and artists, having earned a Master’s at the Sorbonne and considered a career in academia before getting married. Jean-Pierre would accompany Silvia on walks along the shores of the lake, during which they would passionately discuss Schopenhauer, whose evocations of the suffering that coursed through existence resonated so profoundly with the young man. Madame Bresson-Levaint perceived in her friend an intelligence, a depth of feeling and a dexterity with words which she knew was rare and worth cultivating. She urged him to set down his insights with greater discipline and purpose.

  Passolet had never told Madame Bresson-Levaint, nor anyone else, about the abuse he had endured years earlier. The memories of rape and violence still tormented him, triggering panic attacks so severe he had once tried to kill himself by hacking into his wrists. After an April day spent walking in the Alpine foothills, Passolet came to pieces while sitting by the fireplace with Madame Bresson-Levaint. ‘It was as if a dam had burst inside of me,’ he wrote, ‘blown apart by the shock of a happiness that had asked nothing of me, had concealed nothing from me, and which therefore I found unbearable.’ He unburdened himself of his past, and Silvia listened, distraught, while cradling the young man to her breast. The next day, having discussed the matter with her husband, she offered to let Jean-Pierre stay on at the lake house for as long as need be, so that he might try to confront or transmute his suffering, perhaps by shaping a book from his experiences. (The Bresson-Levaints had little faith in psychoanalysis, or psychotherapy in general, despite Silvia’s friendship with Jacques Lacan. Previously, the couple had seen a close friend, a certain Madame Ducroix, kill herself with pills and wine despite years of intensive and costly analysis.)

  Passolet, who was twenty-two and otherwise without direction, accepted the offer. He lived by the lake for a year, alone but for the domestic employee, a thirty-year-old Algerian woman named Celine Begadour, and frequent visits by Madame Bresson-Levaint. The house was well-stocked with literature, and Silvia would bring books from Paris which she felt would inspire Passolet. He read La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and the moralists; the essays of Montaigne (which moved him almost as much as Schopenhauer had); Proust; Pascal; Hegel; Sarraute and the nouveaux romanciers; the Sufi poets; the Gnostic scriptures of Nag Hammadi; almost the entirety of Freud, and much else besides. ‘Most of the real reading I have done in my life, I did during that year,’he later claimed. He wrote each morning, and walked for hours by the lake and into the nearby forest, immersed in himself.

  Although Madame Bresson-Levaint expected that he would use this period to write some kind of memoir or autobiographical novel, the book that was born of that solitary year turned out to be something very different. Set in an unnamed, mist-enshrouded country during a time of war, and populated by characters who appear and then drop out again without logic or pattern, only to reappear with different names and personalities, Cities in Crystal is one of the few novels I know deserving of that much-overused epithet, ‘dreamlike’. It is also a singularly menacing read: although no violence or horror is depicted directly, it is impossible not to sense, on almost every page, the proximity of an intense, brooding malevolence. The elusive narrative is haunted by the presence of a beautiful, dark-haired woman with lines on her face suggesting a hard life and a fierce character. I had read in one of Passolet’s interviews that, although this figure was undoubtedly an avatar of Celine, the woman who came each morning to cook and clean for him, and though he was, in fact, in love with Celine, he remained ignorant of either circumstance until long after the book had been published. ‘Celine walked into my writing the same way she walked into my unconscious: quietly and unnoticed,’ he said. In the novel’s inexplicable final scene, the human characters all transform into birds – sparrows, hawks, peregrines and ravens – and fly together into the sky, ascending through the earth’s atmosphere, dissolving finally in the beyond.

  After a year, Passolet returned to Paris with the typescript of his first novel in his briefcase. It was not difficult for Silvia Bresson-Levaint to persuade a publisher friend to accept it. The book was a modest success and, with the royalties, Passolet rented a small studio apartment on the rue Garancière, near to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he liked to take walks early in the morning. Though he had gained confidence since the publication, Passolet’s success did not spell an end to his psychological turmoil. That winter, while working on an early draft of what would, almost a decade later, become his most famous book, Heaven, he suffered a crisis more severe than any that had gone before. After a volley of desperate, barely coherent letters and phone calls to his friends – though not, oddly, to Silvia Bresson-Levaint – Passolet disappeared. Unable to contact him, his friends (he had long been estranged from his mother and elder brother) had little choice but to believe he was dead, most likely by his own hand.

  The truth was only marginally less unpleasant. Deranged by memories that assailed him now with greater virulence than ever, a dishevelled, unshaven Passolet wandered France for several months, sleeping rough, or in dosshouses patronised by alcoholics and low-lifes. Several times he was taken in by the police and spent the night in a cell. He entered numerous psychiatric institutions, staying for as long as a month before checking himself out to wander once more without aim or destination. He relapsed into alcoholism as he drifted further beyond the limits of respectable society. At one point, he found himself staying amid a community of gypsies who were travelling slowly across the rural north of France. The gypsies tolerated him, for a few days at least, due to the wine he shared, bought with his now-dwindling royalties. One of the gypsies, a mustachioed and sullen man who held a certain status in the camp, and wore a white vest that he never seemed to change, became the object of Passolet’s intense fixation. Every day, Passolet would watch him furtively, initially having no idea why the man exerted such fascin-ation. Then the answer came to him: this man was the tormentor of Passolet’s youth, the boyfriend of his mother who had sexually abused him so many years ago. It didn’t matter that the gypsy looked nothing like the abusive boyfriend, nor that there would have been a huge difference in their respective ages: Passolet knew it was him, either in a cunning disguise, or altered due to some other whim or sorcery. This insane notion, which Passolet felt with the force of a holy revelation, left him terrified. He wept that night as he lay under a few rags in a clearing between two caravans, appalled by the injustice of having his tormentor reappear in his life, no doubt poised to inflict yet more misery on him. But then Passolet hardened, willing his tears to cease. Now was not the time for weakness and self-pity, but for manliness and bloody vengeance. Passolet would prove that his role in life was not that of a mere victim: he decided he would murder the gypsy. The next morning, he stole a heavy knife and concealed it in his trousers. He knew that the gypsy slept in the furthest caravan out from the road, along with his wife and three of his children. Passolet would enter the caravan while the gypsy slept, and plunge the knife into his neck. If the wife or children tried to stop him, he would slaughter them as well. Then, either the other gypsies would lynch him, or he would slash his own throat before they had the chance. Passolet was surprised by how calm he felt, now that the intention was fixed. That night, however, having drifted off while awaiting the optimal moment to carry out the murderous act, he awoke in aghast lucidity: he knew his plan was madness; the gypsy had nothing to do with him; he had never even set eyes on him before arriving at the camp.