This is the Ritual Read online

  Passolet fled that same night, terrified by what he had intended to do, the madness that had possessed him. He hurried by moonlight along rural back-roads, imagining unspeakable forms pursuing him through the darkness. Eventually he reached a stream, which his intuition told him was a safe place – evil could not touch him here. He carved a cross in the earth with his stolen knife, then lay down and slept. When he awoke, the sun was shining in a clear morning sky. A faint breeze stirred the rows of corn growing alongside the grassy bank. Birds chirped, and the stream gurgled gently by his head. Passolet felt the warmth of the sun on his face; he knew that this warmth was the hand of the Lord, and that it offered solace, and deliverance from the devils within; he knew too that he had to prove his ardour to deserve this beneficence. Still lying on his back, Passolet took the long, heavy knife from out of his trouser pocket. With his left hand he unfreed his penis and stretched it out above him. He did not manage to sever the penis completely before he passed out; the damage, however, was enough to ensure he would be wholly impotent for the rest of his life. Passolet was found by a farmer’s young son who was out cycling by the river, a bloody patch spreading from his groin. Had he been left there much longer, he would have bled to death.

  Passolet did not write about this shocking episode for many years. I had agonised, while preparing to interview him, about whether I would bring it up, finally deciding that to do so would serve no purpose other than to feed the salacious curiosity I detested in both the press and myself. After being hospitalised, Passolet was committed to yet another institution, this one in an affluent Paris suburb, his lengthy stay there paid for by the Bresson-Levaints. Thus began the years of Passolet’s long convalescence. Initially, he spent most of his days sitting out in the well-tended grounds of the institution, staring into space, or drawing childish pictures of obese cats with blank, circular faces. Silvia Bresson-Levaint often visited him, on occasion bringing Celine Begadour, who had recognised herself in the pages of Passolet’s book. One spring day in 1986, three years into Passolet’s stay, Celine brought along her young daughter, Beatrice. Passolet said little during the visit, but Celine would later recall, in conversation with a Belgian journalist, that tears had flowed down his face as the dark-haired little girl stood by his side, watching him curiously. Passolet later claimed that it was the sight of Beatrice, the trust and gentleness in her manner, which marked the beginning of his recovery. ‘I could have killed her with my bare hands,’ he said. ‘But she had no fear of me, only this miraculous trust. That was very moving.’ When Passolet finally left the institution a year and a half later, he sought out Celine to thank her for her visits. Discovering that Celine had been widowed some years previously, Passolet proposed to her. At first, she refused – Passolet was, after all, a man who had been institutionalised for years after committing a violent and inexplicable act. Moreover, he was impotent. Yet they remained friends, and Passolet persisted in his declarations of love. Seeing that he moved confidently again in his old social and literary circles (Cities in Crystal had grown in reputation during Passolet’s convalescent years), and was in a position to provide for her daughter and herself, Celine eventually relented. They were married, and lived together in an apartment in the ninth arrondissement.

  Now in his mid-thirties, Passolet enjoyed the first taste life had granted him of a normal, uncomplicated happiness. Re-accessing the creative fount that had been blocked throughout the years of his confinement, Passolet completed Heaven, the book he had started so long before, and immediately began what for my younger self was his essential work, European Graveyards. Published a year after Heaven, a realistic novel depicting the rapture and disintegration of a young Viennese pianist, the later work did not enjoy the same commercial success, but that came as a surprise to nobody. European Graveyards is a strange, difficult, cold book, which casts its affectless gaze across the darkest regions of the twentieth century, weaving historical vignettes with chillingly neutral depictions of Passolet’s own madness and institutionalisation. (The penis-slicing episode is alluded to but not depicted; it would not be until his most straightforwardly autobiographical book, Eggshells, in 1999, that Passolet would write directly about it.) In one chapter, enclosed between essays on ‘rock’n’roll terrorists’ and the ‘eternal howling’ of the Dresden dead, the author Jean-Pierre Passolet has already died. In a suburban psychiatric institution – evoked as a Kafkan or Kunderan waiting-room to a sinister beyond – Passolet’s corpse is placed sitting in a chair, and various figures from his life – Celine, Beatrice, the Bresson-Levaints, the white-vested gypsy, his mother – enter the room to deliver monologues that touch on, but are not restricted to, their relationship with the deceased. A slender, faceless man in a tuxedo appears and announces that he has ‘no quotidian penis’. He undoes his flies to prove it, whilst insisting that the fingers of his left hand are ‘confident, slithering’ penises. Another visitor is an extremely old woman whose body is in an advanced stage of decomposition; she does not say anything, just stands before Passolet’s artificially shiny corpse for a very long time, as if waiting for him to speak. Finally the rotting woman mounts Passolet’s corpse and begins straddling him, fucking him slowly at first, but soon reaching a violent climax – at which point her head falls off, rolls across the floor, and bursts into flames.

  The book is too long – over six hundred pages – but there are moments of eerie, enigmatic beauty which, at least for my eighteen-year-old self, made it seem a devastating work of art. The final section was my favourite: in it, Passolet imagines the cities of Europe emptied of people; not in ruins, not razed or ransacked, but majestic in their desolation, as birds squawk and soar across hazed skies. ‘The world has not ended,’ he tells us, ‘but people have faded away, and have done so willingly, with a lightness of spirit, a lucid joyfulness, as if walking collectively into a great chasm, a gaping maw.’ This section, like so much in Passolet, is offered without explanation. It is not difficult to see why so many readers dismiss Passolet as a particularly glaring exemplar of French pretentiousness, of literary froth, but I have never shared this view.

  Passolet was delighted by the reception that both books found among the French literary establishment. However, lasting happiness was never to be his fate. Within six months of the publication of European Graveyards, he and Celine were divorced. Celine successfully appealed for a restraining order to be placed on Passolet, barring him from seeing Beatrice or her. In court, she cited the growing signs that Passolet was relapsing into hallucination and irrational behaviour. (‘Love’, Passolet had written at another time, ‘is itself a hallucination.’) Within three months of the divorce, Celine had remarried, to a chef from a restaurant near the apartment she had shared with Passolet. Like so many men before him, Passolet took to the bottle in the aftermath of his wife’s desertion, and appeared destined to sink once more into the chaotic life that Celine had done so much to lift him out of. In one notorious incident, he was beaten up outside a respectable Montmartre restaurant, having hurled anti-Semitic insults at a man who was dining with his eighty-nine-year-old mother (neither the man nor his mother were Jewish). Passolet had his jaw and nose broken and appeared in the French press under such headlines as ‘Traitor to Literature’ (Le Monde) and ‘Go Back to the Madhouse, Jean-Pierre!’ (Le Parisien). When, not long after this incident, Silvia Bresson-Levaint died following a struggle with breast cancer, Passolet felt he could not stay in Paris. He stopped drinking and moved to Bruges, where he taught an evening course in creative writing at the university. At a literary conference in London he met Lorraine Holden, remarried, and moved to the UK.

  So began Jean-Pierre Passolet’s steady decline into the obscurity and financial privation in which I would find him, many years later, when I turned up at his council flat in East London. Rather than probe him about the details of his life story, I wanted to talk with him about the work itself.

  I had begun the interview by asking him a question concerning the enigmatic final s
ection of European Graveyards. It was the kind of question I hoped would convince Passolet that he was speaking now with a real admirer, a young reader who possessed an intimate and impassioned affinity with his writing.

  When I asked my question, though, Passolet only smiled abstractedly, lifting his head to gaze out the window, across the skyline. ‘That book, yes . . .’ he said eventually.

  As I waited for him to go on, noises reached us from the hallway; I heard the blonde woman leaving the flat. The silence resumed, persisting long enough for me to grow embarrassed. It was as if Passolet had forgotten I was there. Then he turned to me and said, ‘You say you’re from Ireland?’

  I confirmed this.

  ‘I met Beckett once. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said, surprised.

  Passolet nodded. ‘I was twenty-one. I visited Mr Beckett in the company of a playwright friend who was acquainted with him. We sat in a bare, white room at a wooden table. Beckett made us sandwiches. I remember how he sliced the cucumbers; so very precisely, so thinly. I have never seen cucumbers sliced as thinly as that. They were the thinnest cucumber slices I have ever seen. Yes, such very thin slices . . . A gracious man, Monsieur Beckett.’

  I couldn’t think how to respond. Perhaps sensing my perplexity, Passolet said, ‘Did you say in your email that you were once a student of philosophy?’

  ‘I was, yes.’

  ‘Where did you study?’

  ‘Dublin. Trinity College. The same place as Beckett, actually.’

  He nodded. ‘I mostly read philosophy these days. Very little narrative, very few stories. Through philosophy we can make friends with death. Through good philosophy, anyway. And that becomes very important. Do you know what Schopenhauer said? He said that the Upanishads had been the solace of his life, and they would be the solace of his death. That is beautiful. The Upanishads. He was the first one to open up the Western mind to all those things. Have you read the Upanishads?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Little bits.’

  ‘You must. You must read the Upanishads. And reread Schopenhauer. He will help you to prepare for death. How old are you, tell me?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘Ah. Then you do not think much about death. A man only begins to think of death at thirty. That is when death first makes its presence known – not as the end of life, but as the irrevocability – is that the word? – yes, the irrevocability of the past, the realisation that one’s youth cannot be relived. But ah, forgive me. These words. I am happy you have come to see me. Few do any more.’

  He said this, I thought, without bitterness, simply as an observation. I sensed it was better to remain quiet, not to force anything. I noticed that Passolet’s lips were moving; he was frowning now, muttering inaudibly to himself.

  I wondered whether I should say something. Then Passolet gasped faintly and closed his eyes. A moment later he said, ‘The woman who you saw. Jacqueline. She has lived here with me for two years, nearly three. She is to me, I suppose, what the Upanishads were to Schopenhauer. But not always do I see it that way. I met her during a very unhappy time in her life. She is a magnificent woman. But Jacqueline . . . Jacqueline always has been promiscuous, very promiscuous, ever since she was a teenager. In part this is due to the turmoil of her inner life, the pain she is in. But only in part. She is a nurse, she works in a hospital here which is like something one would find in Dante. She is thirty-nine now, and has slept with many, many men. She loves to sleep with men, to make love to them. She is the kind of woman, you see, who can reach orgasm very easily, and many times.’

  He was watching me as he said all this – I couldn’t conceal my embarrassment. He said, ‘I am telling you this because I want to. I cannot talk about my books, not today. Perhaps, though, you will find some interest in what I say.’

  I assured him, stammeringly, that I would listen to anything he wanted to tell me.

  He nodded and went on. ‘I will tell you something. Jacqueline did not sleep here last night. She spent the night with a man. This was not someone she had known before. It was a man she met at one of the nightclubs. I have never been to these places and I imagine them as something like the underworld. She came in at six o’clock this morning. The smell of him was still on her. So was the smell of her own sweat, her juices. You know, don’t you, that I have been impotent since the age of twenty-four? Since what I did to myself. You have read it in my books. I ask Jacqueline about the men she sleeps with. This one was a large man, bald and with a beard, and tattoos on his biceps. He works as a mechanic, she said. When she came home this morning I made her recount everything they did together. All the close details. They took drugs together: cocaine. It sensitises her body. She rubbed it into his erection, to make it numb, so he will last longer. He made her come six times in the night. Six times. When she told me all this I got up from the bed and wrote it down. I wrote about this man while Jacqueline slept with his seed still in her cunt. He is one of dozens. Last week there was a truck-driver. A truck-driver! There have been many. Almost three years we have lived together. Sometimes she brings them back here, when I am away. She does not clean the sheets before I return. She is a beautiful woman, and she is a woman who enjoys sex. Men see that in her. It draws them to her. She prefers young men, in their twenties, thirties. Younger sometimes. They give her such great pleasure. And I consent to all this. Yes. I encourage it. But do not think that this does not cause me pain. I cannot describe to you how painful this is, when the woman I love so much, who is practically my wife, crawls into bed to get fucked by these men. These brutal, laughing men who light her body up like a firefly, like the fireworks I saw one night when I was crazy in Reims. When she tells me what she does with these men, I weep. I writhe in unsupportable pain. I feel so very worthless and small, like a battered foetus, unwanted, a foetus flushed down the toilet. Or a severed prick that is flung from a window on to a heap of rubbish, devoured by rats and spiders. And then I am cruel to her. I say things to her that would sicken you, things that would make you sick. You would be disgusted with me. But we love each other. This is our way of existing together. I write about these men who fuck her, who sodomise her; these men who get close enough to smell her shit, to see it on their pricks. I try to feel how this must be for them. Every one of them. Look.’

  He gestured towards a stack of printed pages, a foot high, on the floor by the writing desk. ‘That is only some of them. I will never publish any of it. Do you understand why I do this? Schopenhauer read the Upanishads and they taught him that death and agony are finally inconsequential, that we are fused with Being and therefore eternal. This lonely, unhappy man, he saw that the individual is only a figment, a ripple, but our essence is profound and cannot be compromised or lost. That was the salvation of this unhappy man, this rare, tragic German. And I write about these men, these young and virile men she sleeps with. Why should it matter if they fuck the woman I love while I lie here weeping? Why should it matter that I am broken, a eunuch, and they can light up this fire in her? I am these men. We are indestructible in our essence. In the depth of things there is no difference, no separation. There is not even pain, or pain is not worth anything, not worth lamenting, just a dream from which one must awaken. I am each of these men and they are I, as I am Jacqueline. Her bliss, her jouissance is mine. Or it is no one’s. So you see, this is my practice, my spiritual practice. I am purging myself of an agony which is worthless, which persists only because I cling to a delusion that I am separate from this tattooed brute with his pierced phallus. I feel the pain of what she does to me, the burning humiliation. But one day I will not feel this pain, because I will see it for what it is – a delusion. Or perhaps the pain will kill me first; but at least I will die a good death, a spiritual death, a death worthy of the philosophers.’

  When he finished saying all this, Passolet looked intently into my eyes – I felt a pleading, a desperation, as if he needed me not only to understand all this, but to affirm him in i
t: otherwise the whole edifice would crumble. If no one else could see virtue in his self-humiliation, he would be forced to confront an image of himself so stark, so pathetic, that the very sight of it would finish him off. But I didn’t believe him; he couldn’t convince even himself that he wasn’t separate, wasn’t alone, that his misery had some deeper significance.

  Still he was peering into my eyes, pleading wordlessly.

  I had to look away.

  I didn’t ask any more questions. Briskly I thanked Passolet and got up to leave. ‘Yes, very good. I have talked too long,’ he murmured, looking down, the confidence drained from his tone. The spell was broken; it was clear he regretted saying all he had said. Strangely, I now found myself wanting to linger there, to intensify his discomfort. I looked him in the eyes and imagined myself fucking Jacqueline, raping her over the sink while Passolet writhed in his chair, impotent and hateful. I wanted to dash his skull against the wall.

  In the hallway, I stood by the door and shook Passolet’s hand. I heard my own voice sounding coldly formal as I said goodbye. I left him on the doorstep, eyes turned to the ground, muttering again to himself.

  Driving back to London, I already knew that I would not write the article about Passolet. I regretted having gone out there at all, though the cruelty that had welled up in me now subsided, leaving a residue of shame. Better to let the world’s indifference bury him out there, I thought then; better to let him fade away, unmourned and unnoticed.

  For a long time afterwards, I loathed Passolet. I told myself that his books meant nothing to me any more, felt no urge to put anything of him down on paper. I moved on from Passolet in the kind of brutal vanquishing we must inflict on our idols if we are to become what we are. It is only now, with Passolet dead, that my feelings towards him have changed, have relented. His body was found four months ago in his East London flat, badly decomposed, by a Romanian family living on the same floor. He had sat there for weeks, his starving cat chewing the flesh from his face and hands. I have no idea what became of his Jacqueline.