Monsieur Hire

There is a wonderful scene in this film where everyone gathers around the titular character's fallen body on an ice rink, producing concentric circles of onlookers that spread like the pool of blood beneath him. Even without any context, the image reminds the viewer of a bull's eye, which Monsieur Hire (a squeakily pronounced "ear") certainly has on his narrow, uncaressed back. Hire (Michel Blanc) is a tailor by profession, one whose sartorial manias carry over into the layout of his apartment and his fascination with things he cannot have. Single, sexually ambiguous, and very shy, Hire has spent many years (we are never told quite how many) being stared at, pelted with random materials, and generally feared. "Why do you think people are afraid of you?" asks Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire), the young woman who lives across the way and becomes the epicenter of her creepy neighbor's life. The tailor does not know how to answer this question and brushes it off with a platitude, but we know that fear can only come from ignorance. Mediocrity and nondescriptness are the hallmarks of a functioning society; it has no room for freaks or eccentrics, both of which might be used to describe this small man getting on forty, always dressed in black, always dressed impeccably. Why would anyone put so much effort into his outward appearance when he knows that no one will ever compliment him on it? Surely there exist scruffy tailors who fashion quality products, so it cannot only be for professional reasons. "You have no idea how much I've suffered," he says to Alice, who concurs but does not indulge Hire by asking further questions.

Hire, we are told, is short for Hirovitch. In the 1933 original by the Belgian master of detective novels, Hire is a Jew, the classic outsider amidst France's impassioned Catholic throngs. When the book was adapted into this film shortly after the Second World War, it was thankfully no longer possible to dwell on such ethnic stereotypes, and the person was transformed into the opposite – a potential collaborator. Strangely, Blanc's Hire has elements of each side, at once the pariah whose ostracization from society is primarily imputable to his neurotic neatness, lack of confidence and sociability, and his feeling that it is much easier to hide in one's apartment and observe his pet mice than try to make friends in the world. On the other hand, we perceive that Hire is plagued by the worst of conditions: a bad conscience. Some vile act follows him on his daily errands, stands by him as he gazes out his window and into Alice's uncurtained quarters, prevents him from striking his teenage tormentors as they defile him verbally and sometimes even physically. We are then not surprised when Hire is approached by a smarmy police inspector (André Wilms) investigating an awful crime committed not far from the modest Parisian quarter which Hire never seems to leave. Yes, thinks the intuitive demotic mind, Hire would be just the type of person to commit such a crime. After all, outcasts naturally loathe the laws of the societies that do not accept them. Yet the inspector has another reason for visiting Hire: he is just as much the type of person who would notice the slightest disturbance in the neighborhood's locomotion. 

A handful of other details is provided. Hire is a peerless bowler ("the one place where I am not feared," he boasts to the inspector), a regular trick at the local brothels, enamored with one dramatic piano quartet  (written by this composer when he was only twenty-two), and obsessed with watching Alice do everything women in their early twenties do, even with her boyfriend. Hire's voyeurism proceeds unimpeded very much like a silent film, with a booming soundtrack and his strong, almost hysterical expressions occupying the frame of a dark and distant window. Then, in one very curious passage, he tells Alice about an elderly lady who would accost some of Paris's infamous pigeon population and try to feed them. This was, he notes, her main activity, although she wasn't actually giving them food but poison. Why would Hire bother recalling this drab detail considering the slippery slope that he already seems to have transgressed? And why doesn't he finish telling his story? Despite director Patrice Leconte's half-hearted attempt to emphasize Alice's role (the original novel is entitled The engagement of Monsieur Hire), Blanc absorbs all of our interest, expressing the pettiest of concerns with great gusto and all serious emotions with nary a twitch. Alice is a simple country girl who has only been in Paris a few months, but she decides that she could love an outcast. What she doesn't see is that being apart from society is what makes Hire begin each miserable day: he is not so much above it as beside it, watching everyone move, live, and breathe with the exception of himself. Entering society would deprive him of this distinction and he would become just like everyone else. And that is, mind you, absolutely the last thing he would ever do.          

Borges, "Adrogué"

A poem by this Argentine and, research tells me, "a town at the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires which was a summer refuge for the Borges family."  You can read the original here.

Nobody in most baffling night
May see me lost among the swell
Of flowered parks. where garments fell
In folds by love's nostalgic light.

Past noonday sloth, that secret thrush
Refining still the selfsame song;
The fountains purl by arbor's throng,
And statues and odd ruins brush.

In hollow shade a coach apace
Marks, I know well, the confines' shake;
This dust and jasmine world we break,
Herrera and Verlaine's sweet place.

The eucalyptus shade emits
A healing and now ancient scent,
That past its time and language sits
On country farms of memories spent.

Steps search and find the threshold's feet
Its darksome limit the roof suggests;
On chessboard patio facing west
Some water drips in broken beat.

Beyond the doors, they sleep and think
Those who still dream and work at night;
Those lords of visionary sight
Of yesteryear and deadest things.

I know each thing in this old house:
The crystal faces of the clocks,
Revealed in turn upon grey rocks
In faded mirrors' endless joust.

A lion's head whose teeth hold firm 
A ring, then multicolored panes:
A child's first sense of worlds that churn
In red and green, they never wane.

Beyond pure chance and death's black shroud
They last, alone in detailed shape. 
Yet all occurs by fate's mad cape: 
Dimension four, mnemonic cloud.

They last, alone, and so exist 
The gardens, patios, and the past;
In that preserve of rounded cast,
That dawn and dusk will both have kissed.

How could I then have lost the thread,
Beloved, humble things once known?
As distant as the roses shown
In Paradise to Adam's breath?

An elegy of olden days 
Still haunts me now, that house I see!
Yet time remains a mystery
For me, who is time, blood, and pain.

Tsvetaeva, "Маме"

A work ("To Mom") by this Russian poet. You can read the original here.

So much is lost to endless dark,
Extracts from heart’s immortal strands!
Sad lips, your lips, have left their mark,
Luxuriant locks fall on our hands.

Breath slowed upon a notebook space,
Bright rubies’ gleam unites our stare;
And our soft bed reflects your face,
Your smile, your love, is always there.

As wounded birds remind us still
Of youthful woe, your unsaid pleas;
So teardrops wash our lashes’ frill,
As silence shut the piano keys.

The Problem of Thor Bridge

Most men have a little private reserve of their own in some corner of their souls where they don't welcome intruders.

A fortune for one man that was more than he needed should not be built on ten thousand ruined men who were left without the means of life.

We wonder at times why it seems so easy for certain people to devote their lives to money while so many go on at subsistence or below-subsistence levels. Occasionally, at dark moments of my day, I will espy a garish object and covet it, or, I should say, my imagination will create a future or alternative world in which I and that object – however useless and expensive it may be – co-exist happily. The most obvious candidates for such daydreaming are luxury items guised as useful appurtenances: clothes, cars, televisions, kitchen appliances, linens, or other everyday, unnoticeable things that suddenly need to be as beautiful as a sonnet or painting. In some quaint corner of my mind, this object and I sit and stare at one another in mutual understanding: I own the object and the object owns me because it has brought me to value it when what I really want in life – love, friendship, passion, learning, joy – cannot be purchased, lent, stolen, or leased. But these are just moments. Moments in which the basic ease of a materialistic approach to the world becomes as clear and smooth as the diamond bevels that define its status. When I awake from these small journeys into a lesser realm, I become immediately aware of the need for something heartening, a repair of pure artistic delight that is best found on a page or screen. It is clear looking at the motives of men that only a minor percentage of us share these ideals, and that most of us are urged forth by that primordial fear of going backward. Which brings us to this rather unusual entry in a famous collection of stories.

Watson begins his tale on "a wild morning in October," when his peerless companion is found at the breakfast table in a state of "sinister cheerfulness." Connoisseurs of the Holmes tales will already remark that the eponymous sleuth rarely if ever eats in the morning unless he has been up the whole night pondering the intricacies of a case, and agree with Watson that bad weather often affects Holmes in the most dire fashion, "for, like all great artists, he was easily impressed by his surroundings." Yet Holmes is in a fabulous mood because a most bizarre case has been foisted upon him by the police force in Winchester, and it involves the American robber baron J. Neil Gibson:

This man is the greatest financial power in the world, and a man, as I understand, of most violent and formidable character. He married a wife, the victim of this tragedy, of whom I know nothing save that she was past her prime, which was the more unfortunate as a very attractive governess superintended the education of two young children. These are the three people concerned, and the scene is a grand old manor house, the centre of a historical English state.

What is remarkable about this description is its unswerving accuracy: the vast majority of domestic tragedies find their reasoning in a love triangle that is seldom equilateral. That Gibson, a cutthroat industrialist with hardly a gram of pity for the less economically evolved, would be the fulcrum of such a balance beam is not unlikely given the sway that a life of ease can have on a sequacious mind. And Gibson himself is a gunnysack of sorry clichés (a "successful man of affairs, iron of nerve, and leathery of conscience"; "a tall gaunt figure [that] had a suggestion of hunger and rapacity," reminiscent of a line in this play; a man "with a lot of firearms of one sort and another [who] .... sleeps with a loaded revolver in the drawer beside his bed"), unsurprising given his unimaginative ambition to be very rich and to make his competitors very poor. Throw in the typical Americanisms – adjectives used as adverbs, rapid speech, aggressive and colorful language – that Conan Doyle tended to inflict upon all his characters from across the pond apart from the titular heir in this sublime novella, and Gibson cannot but talk with a ferocious overfamiliarity that makes every word sound like a threat (witness the first quote at the beginning of this entry). He is the "Gold King," and bears great resemblance to the figure incused on America's smallest coin if "keyed to base uses instead of high ones." And his attentions will be divided between two women – his wife, Maria Pinto, the daughter of a government official at Manaus and "tropical by birth and tropical by nature," and that "very attractive governess," Grace Dunbar, author of the second quote, who has another end in mind for Gibson's money.

Some details of the crime that should not hint or allege anything in particular: Maria Pinto is dead, "a bullet through her brain and no weapon near her"; a gun was found in the room of Ms. Dunbar, "on the floor of her wardrobe"; and, after a bit of coaxing on our detective's part, Gibson admits that he grew enamored with Ms. Dunbar and swore to leave his wife for her if that's what it would take. Then there is the matter of that bridge:

This bridge – a single broad span of stone with balustraded sides – carries the drive over the narrowest part of a long, deep, reed-girt sheet of water. Thor Mere it is called. In the mouth of the bridge lay the dead woman. Such are the main facts.

That she "was a creature of the tropics, Brazilian by birth," is a revelation akin to one made of a female in another famous Holmes tale – and here cease, alas, the revelations. This story is also noteworthy for its casual mention of three "unsolved cases" that are brought to light in this book penned jointly by the author's son and one of the most famous mystery writers of all time. "Thor Bridge" has long been considered the best tale from Doyle's last collection of stories published shortly before his death in 1930, thanks in no small part to the detail of character and the explanation that seems, upon retrospect at least, both perfectly plausible and perfectly ingenious. Is it significant that, in this case more than in any other, Holmes becomes the moralist we always suspected he might be and reprimands Gibson with the admonition, "some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences"? Perhaps the corners of some men's souls do not merit close inspection.

Das Parfum

Many years ago an acquaintance with a cultivated taste for strong drinks recommended that I read this famous work, particularly effective, he insisted, after several of those concoctions. He also hyped the book as "mind-blowing" (likely betraying one of his own habits), but we are drifting far from our cove. In point of fact, Das Parfum had long been known to me; yet I had never bothered to move past my standard bookstore leaf-through because the story smacked far too much of that frightful misnomer called magical realism. You will hear about it if you are ever unfortunate enough to attend one of those catchy courses on world literature invariably taught by some hipster mediocrity who loves talking up colonialism, relativism, and other impish idolatries, and if you go in for that sort of stuff, there's little that can be done to help you. To be frank, there is nothing magical or real about these works. They are fairy tales, true enough; but instead of revelling in the childish wonder that allows a fairy tale to operate at once as entertainment and allegory, magical realism quickly devolves into socio-political twaddle. It becomes the triumph of native lore over the cold, hard statistics being compiled by the cold, hard conquerors, often understood, in turn, as the New World in its nativeness and the Old World in its demands. Thankfully, our story unfolds exclusively in Old Europe, if demanding enough to remind us why so many of its inhabitants once sought out another realm.

Our senses will revolve around a small, crooked, and ostensibly effete Frenchman by the name of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a frog in both name and appearance. Grenouille is introduced as are many an anti-hero: by the plight of his orphanhood, the hopelessness of his indigence, and his wretched physical condition of his mortal shape. After harrowing, wicked experiences as a parentless urchin who could barely fend for himself, he labors as a tanner for Grimal (a French homophone for "grey evil"), a man known for working children to death – the newly industrial eighteenth century boasted an unkindness all its own – and he survives simply because we will him to do so. We, his readers, know that he cannot die before he has accomplished what God – a term that when mentioned to him much later on provokes "such a blank look that one would think he had heard the word for the first time" – has determined he must do. He must live on because he has a gift that might seem, in that age antecedent to proper sewer systems and hygiene, particularly overwhelming: an unrivaled sense of smell. And soon he masters "all the odors of Paris," which like any city of that period greatly resembled a cistern of unending filth.   

Grenouille goes along with his plight for the lack of any better options, his indifference to his physical well-being making him almost the ideal galley slave. Soon, however, he learns of another career path, and its discovery is precipitated by fate one festive night:

He was just about to leave the boring fireworks performance to head home along the Galerie du Louvre when the wind brought something to him, something tiny and hardly noticeable, a crumb, an atom of a scent, no, something smaller still: the notion or hint of a scent rather than an actual smell, and yet at the same time it was most certainly the hint of something that he had never smelled before .... For the first time it was not only his greedy character revived by some insult that hurt, but also, as it were, his heart. It seemed strange to him that this scent could be the key to the ordering of all other scents – and if you didn't understand this point, you could not say you understood anything about scents. And he, Grenouille, would have wasted his life if he did not manage to possess it. 

Where that scent leads Grenouille is hardly a secret; but what he does when he finds it, foreshadowing the hideous rituals of the novel's last act, need not be revealed on these pages. The faintest whiff and the slightest possible distinction between odors are as clear to Grenouille as a species of bird to the ornithologist or a book in an endless library to the omnilegent. Since Grenouille is creative, self-serving, and wicked in his devotion to his pursuits, he dreams of what all evil genius dreams: neverending, globe-spanning fame. To attain such an end he secures, with repeated displays of his unearthly talents, an apprenticeship with one of Paris's erstwhile great parfumiers, a bloated bourgeois pig called Baldini. Baldini eases slowly into his Salieri role – one more than suspects that the Italian surnames bespeak a fearful symmetry – with Grenouille's unstoppable genius becoming more a source of income than of envy, and soon Baldini is again the most renowned parfumier in all of Paris. But Grenouille's fame will be different than all other glories ever achieved:

He knew now that he had the power to do more. He knew that he could improve that scent. He knew he would able to create a scent that was not only human but superhuman, the scent of an angel, so indescribably good and life-affirming that he who smelled it became bewitched, and simply had to love him, Grenouille, the bearer of that scent, with all his heart.

The comparison to Mozart ends there, thanks in no small part to Grenouille's self-assessment as, well, "completely and utterly evil" (subsequent events do not in the least deter us from this initial evaluation). It would be enough for a good man with Grenouille's abilities to make the most sensational jasmine, honeysuckle, and lilac perfumes the world could ever know. If money or comfort motivated our crooked friend, that would indeed apply – but some devils have little interest in the currencies of men.

Das Parfum is, very much to Süskind's credit, not the kind of novel ordinarily subsumed by my shelves. Its themes, while not quite commercial, are familiar in that way that pastiches of ideas and galleries of oft-used secondary characters for a few brief, ignorant moments seem fresh (this is a book that could not possibly be filmed, and yet it has been). Apart from our olfactory freak, no one is really accorded much originality, even if their stereotypes are parodic and therefore mostly efficacious. Nevertheless, the work's style and self-confidence remain mystifyingly engrossing, perhaps because as foul as Grenouille is, his passion is to an art to which we, shallow beasts, will always be subject. There are numerous unsettling passages, including the sacrifice of animals (why modern letters is so focused on these slaughters is still a puzzle; perhaps because we are to be tacitly equated to such beasts), but most of the cruelty is implied, most of the mayhem offstage, and most of our worries unfounded. Yet in one startling passage towards the culmination of our plot, not our story, something occurs that we somehow sense will not. Moreover, we expect something else to occur – something much more in line with the typical topicality of the magical realism charlatans – and are relieved when it does not take place. And in the end, what does take place? Is the description of that public square as real as it seems to old Grenouille? As real, I suppose, as those Parisian catacombs.